Weird Tales, Oct 1937

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A MAGAZINE OF THE BIZARRE AND UNUSUAL

oc^.e-re-pcr. IN US PATENT OFFICE ~n

| Volume 30 CONTENTS FOR OCTOBER, 1937 NumberTj

Cover Design M. Brundage

Illustrating a scene in "Tiger Cat"
Tiger Cat David H. Keller 386

A story as fascinating as any of the horrors conceit ed in ike tortured mind of Dante or of Toe
Pledged to the Dead Seabury Quinn 397

A thrilling lale of a lover whose sweetheart had been in her grave more than a century

Which Will Scarcely Be Understood Robert E. Howard 4 16

Verse

The Shunned House H. P. Lovecraft 418

A posthumous story of a ret ailing horror in the cellar of an old house
The Homicidal Diary Earl Peirce, Jr. 437

What strange compulsion drove this man to roam the streets and commit his ghastly crimes?

The Long Arm Franz Habl 450

Insidiously crawling and groping, the long arm reached out on its errand of death

The Lake of Life (part 2) Edmond Hamilton 459

A weird-scientific serial replete with thrills, adventure, mystery and romance

The Golgotha Dancers Manly Wade Wellman 483

A curious and terrifying story about an artist who sold his soul 10 paint a living picture

Here Lies H. W. Guernsey 489

An ironic tale about a practical communist who taught his friend when to take him seriously

The Last of Mrs. DeBrugh H. Sivia 492

DeBrugh was dead, but he still regarded his promise as a sacred duty to be fulfilled

To a Skull on My Bookshelf Elizabeth Virgins Raplee 495

Verse

Weird Story Reprint:

The Purple Cincture H. Thompson Rich 496

A popular story from an early number of WEIRD TALES

After Two Nights of the Ear-ache Francis Hard 502

Verse

The Eyrie 503

A department in which the readers express their opinions

Published monthly by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company. 2457 East Washington Street, Indianapolis, Ind. Entered
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Atchuc. Chicago, 111. FARNSWORTH WRIGHT, Ed.tor.

Copyright 1937. by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company.

COPYRIGHTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

WEIRD TALES ISSUED 1st OF EACH MONTH

W. T. — 1 385

er Cat

By DAVID H. KELLER

r A grim tale of torture, and the blind men who were chained to
pillars in an underground cave

THE man tried his best to sell me
the house. He was confident that
I would like it. Repeatedly he
called my attention to the view.

There was something in what he said
about the view. The villa on the top of a
mountain commanded a vision of the
valley, vine-clad and cottage-studded. It
was an irregular bowl of green, dotted
with stone houses which were white-
washed to almost painful brilliancy.

The valley was three and a third miles
at its greatest width. Standing at the
front door of the house, an expert marks-
man with telescopic sight could have
placed a rifle bullet in each of the white
marks of cottages. They nestled like
little pearls amid a sea of green grape-
vines.

"A wonderful view, Signor," the real-
estate agent repeated. "That scene, at
any time of the year, is worth twice what
I am asking for the villa."

"But I can see all this without buy-
ing," I argued.

"Not without trespassing."

"But the place is old. It has no run-
ning water."

"Wrong!" and he smiled expansively,
showing a row of gold-filled teeth.
"Listen."

We were silent.

There came to us the sound of bubbling
water. Turning, I traced the sound. I
found a marble Cupid spurting water in
a most peculiar way into a wall basin.
I smiled and commented.

"There is one like that in Brussels and

386

another in Madrid. But this is very fine.
However, I referred to running water in
a modern bathroom."

"But why bathe when you can sit here
and enjoy the view?"

He was impossible. So, I wrote a
check, took his bill of sale and became
the owner of a mountain, topped by a
stone house that seemed to be half ruin.
But he did not know, and I did not tell
him that I considered the fountain alone
worth the price that I had paid. In fact,
I had come to Italy to buy that fountain
if I could; buy it and take it back to
America with me. I knew all about that
curious piece of marble. George Sea-
brook had written to me about it. Just
one letter, and then he had gone on,
goodness knows where. George was like
that, always on the move. Now I owned
the fountain and was already planning
where I should place it in my New York
home. Certainly not in the rose garden.

I sat down on a marble bench and
looked down on the valley. The real-
estate man was right. It was a delicate,
delicious piece of scenery. The surround-
ing mountains were high enough to
throw a constant shadow on some part
of the valley except at high noon. There
was no sign of life, but I was sure that
the vineyards were alive with husband-
men and their families. An eagle floated
serenely on the upper air currents, auto-
matically adjusting himself to their con-
stant changing.

Stretching myself, I gave one look at
my car and then walked into the house.

IN the kitchen two peasants sat, an old "It seems so."

man and an old woman. They rose as ' Many masters?"

I entered. "Alas! yes. They come andigo. Nice

"Who are you?*' I asked in English. young men, like you, but 'they do not

They simply smiled and waved their stay. They buy and look at the view, and

hands. I repeated my question in Italian, eat with us a few days and then they are

"We serve,*' the man replied. gone."

"Serve whom?" "And then the villa is sold again?"

"Whoever is the master." The man shrugged. "How should we

"Have you been here long?" know? We simply serve."

"We have always been here. It is our "Then prepare me my dinner. And

home." serve it outside, under the grapevine,

His statement amused me, and I com- where I can see the view."

mented, "The masters come and go, but The woman started to obey. The man

you remain?" came nearer.

388

WEIRD TALES

"Shall I carry your bags to the bed-
room?"

"Yes. And I will go with you and
unpack."

He took me to a room on the second
floor. There was a bed there and a very
old chest of drawers. The floor, every-
thing about the room was spotlessly clean .
The walls had been freshly whitewashed.
Their smooth whiteness suggested won-
derful possibilities for despoliation, the
drawing of a picture, the writing of a
poem, the careless writhing autograph
that caused my relatives so much despair.

"Have all the masters slept here?" - 1
asked carelessly.

'•All."

"Was there one by the name of George
Seabrook?"

"I think so. But they come and go. 1
1 am old and forget."

"And all these masters, none of them
ever wrote on the walls?"

"Of a certainty. All wrote with pencil
what they desired to write. Who should
say they should not? For did not the villa
belong to them while they were here?
But always we prepared for the new
master, and made the walls clean and
beautiful again."

"You were always sure that there
■would be a new master?"

"Certainly. Someone must pay us our
wages."

I gravely placed a gold piece in his
itching palm, asking, "What did they
•write on the walls?"

He looked at me with old, unblinking
eyes. Owl eyes! That is what they were,
and he slowly said,

"Each wrote or drew as his fancy led
him, for they were the masters and could
do as they wished."

"But what were the words?"

"I cannot speak English, or read it."

Evidently, the man was not going to
talk. To me the entire situation was most

interesting. Same servants, same villa,
many masters. They came and bought
and wrote on the wall and left, and then
my real-estate friend sold the house
again. A fine racket!

Downstairs, outdoors, under the grape-
vine, eating a good Italian meal, looking
at the wonderful view, I came to laugh at
my suspicions. I ate spaghetti, olives,
dark bread and wine. Silence hung heav-
ily over the sullen sleepy afternoon. The
sky became copper-colored. It was about
to rain. The old man came and showed
me a place to put my car, a recess in the
wall of the house, open at one end, but
sheltered from the weather. The stone
floor was black with grease; more than
one automobile had been kept there.

"Other cars have been here," I ven-
tured.

"All the masters had cars," the old man
replied.

Back on the stone gallery I waited for
the storm to break. At last it came in
a solid wall of gray wetness across the
valley. Nearer and nearer it came till it
deluged my villa and drove me inside.

The woman was lighting candles. I
took one from her hand.

"I want to look through the house," I
explained.

She made no protest; so I started ex-
ploring the first floor. One room was
evidently the sleeping- quarters- for the
servants; another was the kitchen, and
the remaining two might have served in
the olds days for dining-room and draw-
ing-room. There was little furniture, and
the walls were gray with time and mold.
One flight of stone stairs led upward to
the bedroom, another to the cellar. I
decided to go downstairs.

They were steps, not made of masonry,
but apparently carved out of the living
rock. The cellar was simply a cubical
hole in the mountain. It all looked verjr

TIGER CAT

389

old. I had the uneasy feeling that orig-
inally that cellar had been a tomb and
that later the house had been built over
it. But, once at the bottom, there was
nothing to indicate a sepulcher. A few
small casks of wine, some junk, odds of
rope and rusty iron, those were in the
corners; otherwise, the room was empty,
and dusty.

"It is an odd room," I commented to
myself. It seemed in some way out of
place and out of shape and size for the
villa above it. I had expected something
more, something larger, gloomier. Walk-
ing around, I examined the walls, and
then something came to my alert senses.

Three sides of the room were carved
out of rock, but the remaining side was
of masonry, and in that side there was a
door. A door! And why should a door
be there except to lead to another room?
There was a door, and that presupposed
something on the other side. And what
a door it was! More of a barricade than
a partition. The iron hinges were built
to support weight and give complete de-
fense and support. There was a keyhole,
and if the key corresponded with the size
of the hole, it was the largest that I
had ever heard of.

Naturally, I wanted to open the door.
As master of the villa, I had a right to.
Upstairs the old woman seemed unable
to understand me and ended by telling me
to see her husband. He, in turn, seemed
incapable of following my stream of talk.
At last, I took him to the door and
pointed to the keyhole. In English, Ital-
ian and sign language I told him rather
emphatically that I wanted the key to
that door. At last he was willing to admit
that he understood my questions. He
shook his head. He had never had the
key to that door. Yes, he knew that there
was such a door, but he had never been
on the other side. It was very old. Per-
haps his ancestors understood about it,

but they were all dead. He made me
tired, so much so that I rested by placing
a hand on the butt of the upper hinge. I
knew that he was deceiving me. Lived
there all his life and never saw the door
open!

"And you have no key to that door?"
I repeated.

"No. I have no key."
"Who has the key?"
"The owner of the house."
"But I own it."

"Yes, you are the master; but I mean
the one who owns it all the time."

"So, the various masters do not really
buy the place?'*

"They buy it. but they come and go."

"But the owner keeps on selling it and
owning it?"

"Yes."

"Must be a profitable business. And
who owns it?"

"Donna Marchesi."

"I think I met her yesterday in
Sorona."

"Yes, that is where she lives."

The storm had passed. Sorona was
only two miles away, on the other side of
the mountain. The cellar, the door, the
mysterious uncertainty on the other side
intrigued me. I told the man that I would
be back by supper, and I went to my bed-
room to change, preparatory to making an
afternoon call.

In the room I found my hand black
with oil.

And that told me a good many things,
as it was the hand that had rested against
the upper hinge of the door. I washed
the hand, changed my clothes and drove
my car to Sorona.

Fortunately, the Donna Marchesi
was at home. I might have met her
before, but I now saw her ethereal beauty
for the first time. A least, it seemed
ethereal at the first moment. In some

390

WEIRD TALES

ways she was the most beautiful woman
that I had ever seen : skin white as milk,
hair a tawny red, piled in great masses
on her head, and eyes of a peculiar
green, with pupils that were slots instead
of circles. She wore her nails long, and
they were tinted red to match the Titian
of her hair. She seemed surprized to have
me call on her. and more surprized to
hear of my errand.

"You bought the villa?" she asked.

"Yes. Though, when I bought it, I
did not know that you were the owner.
The agent never stated whom he was
acting for."

"I know," she said with a smile.
"Franco is peculiar that way. He always
pretends that he owns the place."

"No doubt he has used it more than
once."

"I fear so. The place seems to be un-
fortunate. I sell it with a reserve clause.
The owner must live there. And no one
seems to want to stay; so the place reverts
back to me."

"It seems to be an old place."

"Very old. It has been in my family
for generations. I have tried to get rid of
it, but what can I do when the young
men will not stay?"

She shrugged her shoulders expressive-
ly. I countered with,

"Perhaps if they knew, as I do, that
you owned the property, they would be
content to stay, for ever, in Sorona."

"Prettily said," she answered. Then
the room became silent, and I heard her
heavy breathing, like the deep purr of
a cat.

"They come and go,*' she said at last.

"And, when they go, you sell to an-
other?" I asked.

"Naturally, and with the hope that
one will stay."

"I have come for the key," I said
bluntly, "die key to the cellar door."

"Are you sure you want it?"

"Absolutely! It is my villa and my cel-
lar and my door. I want the key. I want
to see what is on the other side of the
door."

And then it was that I saw the pupils
of her eyes narrow to livid slits. She
looked at me for a second, for five, and
then opening a drawer in a cabinet near
her chair, she took out the key and
handed it to me. It was a tool worthy of
the door that it was supposed to open,
being fully eight inches long and a pound
in weight.

Taking it, I thanked her and said good-
bye. Fifteen minutes later I was back,
profuse in my apologies: I was tempera-
mental, I explained, and I frequently
changed my mind. Whatever was on the
other side of the door could stay there, as
far as I was concerned. Then again I
kissed her hand farewell.

On the side street I passed through
the door of a locksmith and waited while
he completed a key. He was following a
wax impression of the original key. An
hour later I was on the way back to the
villa, with the key in my pocket, a key
that I was sure would unlock the door,
and I was confident that the lady with
the cat eyes felt sure that I had lost
all interest in that door and what was
beyond it.

The full moon was just appearing over
the mountains when I drove my car up to
the villa. I was tired, but happy. Taking
the candlestick in my hand, which candle-
stick was handed to me with a deep bow
by the old woman, I ascended the stairs
to my bedroom. And soon I was fast
asleep.

I awoke with a start. The moon was
still shining. It was midnight. I
heard, or thought I heard, a deep moan-
ing. It sounded a little like waves beat-
ing on a rockbound coast. Then it ceased
and was replaced by a musical element

TIGER CAT

391

that came in certain stately measures.
Those sounds were in the room, but they
came from far away; only by straining my
sense of sound to the utmost could I hear
anything.

Slippers on my feet, flashlight in my
hand and the key in the pocket of my
dressing-gown, I slowly descended the
stairs. Loud snores from the servants'
room told, or seemed to tell, of their deep
slumbers. Down into the cellar I went
and put the key into the hole of the lock.
The key turned easily — no- rust there —
the springs and the tumblers had been
well oiled, like the hinges. It was evi-
dent that the door had been used often.
Turning the light on the hinges, I saw
what had made my hand black with oil.
Earnestly I damned the sen-ants. They
knew about the door. They knew what
was on the other side!

Just as I was about to open the door I
heard a woman's voice singing in Italian;
it sounded like a selection from an opera.
It was followed by applause, and then a
moaning, and one shrill cry, as though
someone had been hurt. There was no
doubt now as to where the sounds that I
heard in my room had come from; they
had come from the other side of the door.
There was a mystery there for me to solve.
But I was not ready to solve it; so I
turned the key noiselessly, and with the
door locked, tiptoed back to my bed.

There I tried to put two and two to-
gether. They made five, seven, a million
vague admixtures of impossible results,
all filled with weird forebodings. But
never did they make four, and till they
did, I knew the answers to be wrong, for
two and two had to make four.

Many changes of masters! One after
another they came and bought and dis-
appeared. A whitewashed wall. What
secrets were covered with that white-
wash? A door in a cellar. And what
deviltry went on behind it? A key and

a well-oiled lock, and servants that knew
everything. In vain the question came
to me. What is back of the door? There
was no ready answer. But, Donna Mar-
chesi knew! Was it her voice that I had
heard? She knew almost everything about
it, but there was one thing that I knew
and she did not. She did not know that
I could pass through the door and find
out what was on the other side. She did
not know that I had a key.

The next day I pleaded indisposition
and spent most of the hours idling and
drowsing in my chamber. Not till nearly
midnight did I venture down. The serv-
ants were certainly asleep that time. A
dose of chloral in their wine had attended
to the certainty of their slumbers. Fully
dressed, with an automatic in my pocket,
I reached the cellar and opened the door.
It swung noiselessly on its well-greased
hinges. The darkness on the other side
was the blackness of hell. An indescrib-
able odor came to me, a prison smell and
with it the soft half sob, half laugh of
sleeping children, dreaming in their sleep,
and not happy.

I flashed the light around the room. It
was not a room but a cavern, a cave that
extended far into the distance, the roof
supported by stone pillars, set at regular
intervals. As far as my light would
carry I saw the long rows of white
columns.

And to each pillar was bound a man,
by chains. They were resting on the
stone floor, twenty or more of them, and
all asleep. Snores, grunts and weary
sighs came from them, but not a single
eyelid opened. Even when I flashed the
light in their faces their eyes were shut.

And those faces sickened me; white
and drawn and filled with the lines of
deep suffering. All were covered with
scars; long, narrow, deep scars, some
fresh and red, others old and dead-white.
At last, the sunken eyelids and the inabil-

392

WEIRD TALES

ity to see my flashlight and respond told
me the nauseating truth. Those men
were all blind.

A pleasant sight! One blind man,
looking eternally into the blackness of his
life, and chained to a pillar of stone —
that was bad enough; but multiply that
by twenty! Was it worse? Could it be
worse? Could twenty men surfer more
than one man? And then a thought came
to me, a terrible, impossible thought, so
horrible that I doubted my logic. But
now two and two were beginning to make
four. Could those men be the masters?
They came and bought and left — to go
to the cellar and stay there!

"Oh! Donna Marchesi!" I whispered.
"How about those cat-eyes? If you had
a hand in this, you are not a woman. You
are a tiger."

I thought that I understood part of it.
The latest master came to her for the
key to the cellar, and then, when he once
passed through the door he never left.
She and her servants were not there to
welcome me that night, because she did
not know that I had a key.

The thought came to me that perhaps
one of those sleeping men was George
Seabrook. He and I used to play tennis
together and we knew each other like
brothers. He had a large scar on the back
of his right hand; a livid star-shaped
scar. With that in mind, I walked care-
fully from sleeping man to sleeping man,
looking at their right hands. And I
found a right hand with a scar that was
shaped like the one I knew so well. But
that blind man, only a skin-covered
skeleton, chained to a bed of stone! That
could not be my gay young tennis player,
George!

The discover)- nauseated me. What did
it mean? What could it mean? If the
Donna Marchesi was back of all that
misery, what was her motive?

Down the long cave-like room I went.
There seemed to be no end to it, though
many of the columns were surrounded
with empty chains. Only those near the
door had their human flies in the trap.
In the opposite direction the rows of pil-
lars stretched into a far oblivion. I
thought that at the end there was the
black mouth of a tunnel, but I could
not be sure and dared not go that far to
explore the truth. Then, out of that tun-
nel, I heard a voice come, a singing voice.
Slipping my shoes off, I ran back near the
door and hid as best I could in a dark
recess, back of a far piece of stone. I
stood there in the darkness, my torch out,
the handle of the revolver in my hand.

The singing grew louder and louder,
and then the singer came into view. It
was none other than Donna Marchesi!
She carried a lantern in one hand and a
basket in the other. Hanging the lantern
on a nail, she took the basket and went
from one sleeping man to another. With
each her performance was the same; she
awakened them with a kick in the face,
and then, when they sat up crying with
pain, she placed a hard roll of bread in
their blind, trembling, outstretched hand.
With all fed, there was silence save for
gnawing teeth breaking through the hard
crusts. The poor devils were hungry,
starving slowly to death, and how they
wolfed the bread! She laughed with
animal delight as they cried for more.
Standing under the lamp, a lovely devil
in her decollete dress, she laughed at
them. I swear I saw her yellow eves,
dilated in the semi-darkness!

Suddenly she gave the command,

"Up! you dogs, up!"

Iike well-trained animals they rose to
J their feet, clumsily, but as fast as they
could under the handicap of trembling
limbs and heavy chains. Two were slow
in obeying, and those she struck across

the face with a small whip, till the)*
whined with pain.

They stood there in silence, twenty odd
blind men, chained against as many pil-
lars of stone; and then the woman, stand-
ing in the middle of them, started to sing.
It was a well-trained voice, but metallic,
and her high notes had in them the cry
of a wild animal. No feminine softness
there. She sang from an Italian opera,
and I knew that I had heard that song
before. While she sang, her audience
waited silently. At last she finished, and
they started to applaud. Shrunken hands
beat noisily against shrunken hands.

She seemed to watch them carefully, as
though she were measuring the degree of
their appreciation. One man did not sat-
isfy her. She went over and dug into
his face with long strokes of those long
red nails until his face was red and her
fingers bloody. And when she finished
her second song that man clapped louder
than any of them. He had learned his
lessen.

She ended by giving them each another
roll and a dipper of water. Then, lantern
and basket in her hands, she walked away
and disappeared down the tunnel. The
blind men, crying and cursing in their
impotent rage, sank down on their stone
beds.

I went to my friend, and louk his hand.
"George! George Seabrook!" I whis-
pered.

He sat up and cried, "Who calls me?
Who is there?"

I told him, and he started to cry. At
last he became quiet enough to talk to me.
What he told me, with slight variants,
was the story of all the men there and
all the men who had been there but who
had died. Each man had been master for
a day or a week. Each had found the
cellar door and had come to the Donna
Marchesi for the key. Some had been
suspicious and had written their thoughts

on the wall of their bedroom. But one
and all had, in the end, found their
curiosity more than they could resist and
had opened the door. On the other side
they had been overpowered and chained
to a pillar, and there they had remained
till they died. Some of them lived longer
than the rest. Smith of Boston had been
there over two years, though he was
coughing badly and did not think that he
could last much longer. Seabrook told
me their names. They were the best blood
of America, with three Englishmen and
one Frenchman.

"And are you all blind?" I whispered,
dreading the answer.

"Yes. That happens the first night we
are here. She does it with her nails."
"And she comes every night?"

"Ever)- night. She feeds us and sings
to us and we applaud. When one of us
dies, she unchains the body, and throws
it down a hole somewhere. She talks to
us about that hole sometimes and brags
that she is going to fill it up before she
stops."

"But who is helping her?"

"I think it is the real-estate man. Of
course, the old devils upstairs help. I
think that they must drug us. Some of
the men say that they went to sleep in
their beds and woke, chained to their
posts."

My voice trembled as I bent over and
whispered in his ear, "What would you
do, George, if she came and sang, and you
found that you were not chained? You
and the other men not chained? What
would you men do, George?"

"Ask them," he snarled. "Ask them,
one at a time. But I knew what I would
do. I know!"

And he started to cry, because he could
not do it the next second; cried from
rage and helplessness till the tears ran
from his empty sockets.

394

WEIRD TALES

"Does she always come at the same
time?"

"As far as I know. But time is noth-
ing to us. We just wait for death."
"Are the chains locked?"

"Yes. And she must have the key. But
we could file the links if only we had files.
If only eadi of us had a file, we could get
free. Perhaps the man upstairs has a key,
but I hardly think so."

"Did you write on that pretty wall up-
stairs, tiie whitewashed wall?"

"I did; I think we all did. One man
wrote a sonnet to the woman, verses in
her honor, telling about her beautiful
eyes. He raved about that poem for
hours while he was dying. Did you ever
see it on the wall?"

"I did not see it. The old people
whitewash the walls before each new
master comes."

"I thought so."

"Are you sure you would know what
to do, George, if she sang to you and
you were loose?"

"Yes, we would know."

So I left him, promising an end to the
matter as soon as I could arrange it.

The next day saw me calling on the
Donna Marchesi. I took her flowers
that time, a corsage of vivid purple and
scarlet orchids. She entertained me in her
music room and I, taking the hint, asked
her to sing. Shyly, almost with reluctance,
she did as I asked. She sang the selec-
tion from the Italian opera that I knew
so well. I was generous in my applause.
She smiled.

"You like to hear me sing?"

"Indeed! I want to hear you again. I
could hear you daily without growing
tired."

"You're nice," she purred. "Perhaps it
could be arranged."

"You are too modest. You have a won-

derful voice. Why not give it to the
world?"

"I sang once in public," she sighed.
"It was in New York, at a -private
musical. There were many men there.
Perhaps it was stage fright; my voice
broke badly, and the audience, especially
the men, were not kind. I am not sure,
but I thought that I heard some of them
hiss me."

"Surely not!" I protested.

"Indeed, so. But no man has hissed
my singing since then."

"I hope not!" I replied indignantly.
"You have a wonderful voice, and, when
I applauded you, I was sincere. By the
way, may I change my mind and ask for
the key to the door in the cellar?"

"Do you want it, really want it, my
friend?"

"I am sure I do. I may never use it,
but it will please me to have it. Little
things in life make me happy, and this
key is a little thing."

"Then you shall have it. Will you do
me a favor? Wait till Sunday to use it.
Today is Friday, and you will not have
to wait many hours."

"It will be a pleasure to do as you
desire," I replied, kissing her hand.
"And shall I hear you sing again? May
I come often to hear you sing?"

"I promise you that," she sighed. "I
am sure that you will hear me sing often
in the future. I feel that in some way
our fates approach the same star."

I looked into her eyes, her yellow cat-
eyes, and I was sure that she spoke the
truth. Destiny had certainly brought me
to find her in Sorona.

I bought two dozen rat-tailed files,
and dashed across the mountains to
Milan. There I was closeted with the con-
suls of three nations: England, France
and my own. They did not want to be-
lieve my story. I gave them names, and

they had to admit that there had been
inquiries, but they felt that the main
details were nightmares, resulting from
an over-use of Italian wines. But I in-
sisted that I was not drunk with new
wine. At last, they called in the chief of
the detective bureau. He knew Franco,
the real-estate agent; also the lady in
question. And he had heard something
of the villa; not much, but vague whis-
perings.

"We will be there Saturday night," he
promised. "That leaves you tonight. The
lady will not try to trap you till Sunday.
Can you attend to the old people?"

"They will be harmless. See that
Franco does not have a chance to escape.
Here is the extra key to the door. I will
go through before twelve. When I am
ready, I will open the door. If I am not
out by one in die morning, you come
through with your police. Do we all
understand?"

"I understand," said the American con-
sul. "But I still think you are dream-
ing."

Back at the villa, I again drugged the
old people, not much, but enough to
insure their sleep that night. The)' liked
me. I was liberal with my gold, and I
carelessly showed them where I kept my
reserve.

Then I went through the door. Again
I heard the Donna Marchesi sing to an
audience that would never hiss her. She
left, and I started to distribute the files.
From one blind wretch to the next I
went, whispering words of cheer and in-
struction for the next night. They were
to cut through a link in the chain, but
in such a way that the Tiger Cat would
not suspect that they had gained their
liberty. Were they pleased to have a
hope of freedom? I am not sure, but
they were delighted at another prospect.

The next night I doubled the tips to

the old servants. With tears of gratitude
in their eyes, they thanked me as they
called me their dear master. I put them to
sleep as though they were babies. In fact,
I wondered at the lime if they would ever
recover from the dose of chloral I gave
them. I did not even bother to tie them,
but just tossed them on their beds.

At half past ten, automobiles began to
arrive with darkened lights. We had a
lengthy conference, and soon after eleven
I went through the door. I lost no time
in making sure that each of the blind
mice was a free man, but I insisted that
they 3ct as though bound till the proper
time. They were trembling, but it was
not from fear, not that time.

Back in my hiding-place I waited, and
soon I heard the singing voice. Ten
minutes later the Donna Marchesi had
her lantern hung on the nail. Ah! She
was more beautiful that night than I had
ever seen her. Dressed in filmy white,
her beautiful body, lovely hair, long lithe
limbs would have bound any man to her
through eternity. She seemed to sense
that beauty, for, after giving out the first
supply of rolls, she varied her program.
She told her audience how she had
dressed that evening for their special
pleasure. She described her jewels and
her costume. She almost became grand-
iose as she told of her beauty, and, driv-
ing in the dagger, she twisted it as she
reminded them that never would they be
able to see her, never touch her or kiss
her hand. All they could do was to hear
her sing, applaud and at hist die.

Of all the terrible things in her life
that little talk to those blind men was
the climax.

And then she sang. I watched her
closely, and I saw what I suspected. She
sang widi her eyes closed. Was she in
fancy seeming that she was in an opera-
house before thousands of spellbound ad-
mirers? Who knows? But ever as she

WEIRD TALES

sang that night her eyes were closed, and
even as she came to a close, waiting for
the usual applause, her eyes were closed.

She waited in the silence for the clap
of hands. It did not come. With
terrific anger, she whirled to her basket
and readied for her whip.

"Dogs!" she cried. "Have you so soon
forgot your lesson?"

And then she realized that the twenty
blind men were closing in on her. They
were silent, but their outstretched hands
were feeling for something that they
wanted very much. Even when her whip
started to cut, they were silent. Then
one man touched her. To her credit,
there was no sign of fear. She knew
what had happened. She must have
known, but she was not afraid. Her
single scream was nothing but the battle-
cry of the tiger cat going into action.

There was a single cry, and that was
all. The men reached for what they
wanted in silence. For a while they
were all in a struggling group on their
feet, but soon they were all on the
ground. It was simply a mass, and under
that mass was a biting, scratching, fight-
ing, dying animal.

I couldn't stand it. I had planned it

all, I wanted it all to happen, but when
it came, I just couldn't stand it. Covered
with the sweat of fear, I ran to the door
and unlocked it. I swung it open, went
through the doorway, closed it and locked
it again. The men, waiting for me in the
cellar, looked on with doubt. It seemed
that they were right in thinking that my
tale was an alcoholic one.

"Give me whisky!" I gasped, as I
dropped on the floor.

In a few minutes I had recovered.

"Open the door," I ordered. "And
bring the blind men out."

One at a time they were brought to
the kitchen, and identified. Some were
terribly mutilated in the face, long deep
scratches, and even pieces bitten out, and
one had the corner of his mouth torn.
Most of them were sobbing hysterically,
but, in some way, though none said so,
I judged that they were all happy.

We went back to the cellar and through
the door. On the stone floor was a clotted
mass of red and white.

"What's that?" asked the American
consul.

"I think that is the Donna Marchesi,"
I replied. "She must have met with an
accident."

<lR>

ledged to the Dead

By SEABURY QUINN

A tale of a lover who was pledged to a sweetheart who had been m her grave
for more than a century, and of the striking death that
menaced him — a story of Jules de Grand in

THE autumn dusk had stained the
sky with shadows and orange ob-
longs traced the windows in my
neighbors' homes as Jules de Grandin and
i I sat sipping kaiserschmarrn and coffee

in the study after dinner. "Mon Dieu,"
the little Frenchman sighed, "I have the
mai du pays, my friend. The little chil-
dren run and play along the roadways at
Saint Cloud, and on the lie de France the

397

398

WEIRD TALES

pastry cooks set up their booths. Cor bleu,
it takes the strength of character not to
stop and buy those cakes of so much
taste and fancy! The Napoleons, they are
crisp and fragile as a coquette's promise,
the eclairs filled with cool, sweet cream,
the cream-puffs all aglow with cherries.
Just to see them is to love life better.
They "

The shrilling of the door-bell startled
me. The pressure on the button must
have been that of one who leant against
it. "Doctor Trowbridge; I must see him
right away!" a woman's voice demanded
as Nora McGinnis, my household fac-
totum, grudgingly responded to the hail.

"Th' docthor's offiss hours is over,
ma'am," Nora answered frigidly. "Ha'f
past nine ter eleven in th' marnin', an'
two ter four in th' afthernoon is when
he sees his patients. If it's an urgent case
ye have there's lots o' good young doc-
thors in th' neighborhood, but Docthor
Trowbridge ' '

"Is he here?" the visitor demanded
sharply.

"He is, an' he's afther digestin' his
dinner — an' an illigant dinner it wuz,
though I do say so as shouldn't — an' he
can't be disturbed "

"He'll see me, all right. Tell him it's
Nella Bentley, and I've got to talk to
him!"

De Grandin raised an eyebrow elo-
quently. "The fish at the aquarium have
greater privacy than we, my friend," he
murmured, but broke off as the visitor
came clacking down the hall on high
French heels and rushed into the study
half a dozen paces in advance of my
thoroughly disapproving and more than
semi-scandalized Nora.

"Doctor Trowbridge, won't you help
me?" cried the girl as she fairly leaped
across the study and flung her arms about
my shoulders. "I can't tell Dad or
Mother, they wouldn't understand; so

you're the only one — oh, excuse me, I
thought you were alone!" Her face went
crimson as she saw de Grandin standing
by the fire.

"It's quite all right, my dear," I
soothed, freeing myself from her almost
hysterical clutch. "This is Doctor dc
Grandin, with whom I've been associated
many times; I'd be glad to have the ben-
efit of his advice, if you don't mind."

She gave him her hand and a wan
smile as I performed the introduction, but
her eyes warmed quickly as he raised her
fingers to his lips with a soft "Enchante,
Mademoiselle Women, animals and
children took instinctively to Jules de
Grandin.

Nella dropped her coat of silky shaven
lamb and sank down on the study couch,
her slim young figure molded in her
knitted dress of coral rayon as revealingly
as though she had been cased in plastic
cellulose. She has long, violet eyes and
a long mouth; smooth, dark hair parted in
the middle; a small straight nose, and a
small pointed chin. Every line of her
is long, but definitely feminine; breasts
and hips and throat and legs all deli-
cately curved, without a hint of angu-
larity.

"I've come to see you about Ned," she
volunteered as de Grandin lit her cig-
arette and she sent a nervous smoke-
stream gushing from between red, trem-
bling lips. "He — he's trying to run out
on me!"

"You mean Ned Minton?" I asked,
wondering what a middle-aged physician
could prescribe for wandering Romcos.

"I certainly do mean Ned Minton," she
replied, "and I mean business, too. The
darn, romantic fool!"

De Grandin's slender brows arched up-
ward till they nearly met the beige-blond
hair that slanted sleekly backward from
his forehead. " Pardonnez-mo'i he mur-
mured. "Did I understand correctly,

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

399

Mademoiselle? Your amoureux — how do
you say him? — sweetheart? — has shown
a disposition toward unfaithfulness, yet
you accuse him of romanticism?"

"He's not unfaithful, that's the worst
of it. He's faithful as Tristan and the
chevalier Bayard lumped together, sans
pettr et sans reproche, you know. Says we
can't get married, 'cause "

"Just a moment, dear," I interrupted
as I felt my indignation mounting. "D'ye
mean the miserable young puppy cheated,
and now wants to welch "

HER blue eyes widened, then the little
laughter-wrinkles formed around
them. "You dear old mid-Victorian!"
she broke in. "No, he ain't done wrong
by our Nell, and I'm not asking you to
take your shotgun down and force him
to make me an honest woman. Suppose
we start at the beginning: then we'll get
things straight.

"You assisted at both our debuts, I've
been told; you've known Ned and me
since we were a second old apiece, haven't
you?"

I nodded.

"Know we've always been crazy about
each other, too; in grammar school, high
school and college, don't you?"

"Yes," I agreed.

"All right. We've been engaged ever
since our freshman year at Beaver. Ned
just had his frat pin long enough to pin
it on my shoulder-strap at the first fresh-
man dance. Everything was set for us to
stand up in the chancel and say 'I do'
this June; then Ned's company sent him
to New Orleans last December." She
paused, drew deeply at her cigarette,
crushed its fire out in an ash-tray, and
set a fresh one glowing.

"That started it. While he was down
there it seemed that he got playful. Mixed
up with some glamorous Creole gal."
Once more she lapsed into silence and I

could see the heartbreak showing through
the armor of her flippant manner.

"You mean he fell in love "

"I certainly do not! If he" had, I'd
have handed back his ring and said
'Bless you, me children', even if I had
to bite my heart in two to do it; but this
is no case of a new love crowding out the
old. Ned still loves me; never stopped
loving me. That's what makes it all seem
crazy as a hashish-eater's dream. He was
on the loose in New Orleans, doing the
town with a crowd of local boys, and
prob'bly had too many Ramos fizzes.
Then he barged into this Creole dame's

place, and " she broke off with a

gallant effort at a smile. "I guess young
fellows aren't so different nowadays than
they were when you were growing up, sir.
Only today we don't believe in sprinkling
perfume in the family cesspool. Ned
cheated, diat's the bald truth of it; he
didn't stop loving me, and he hasn't
stopped now, but I wasn't there and that
other girl was, and there were no con-
ventions to be recognized. Now he's
fairly melting with remorse, says he's not
worthy of me — wants to break off our en-
gagement, while he spends a lifetime do-
ing penance for a moment's folly."

"But good heavens," I expostulated,

"if you're willing to forgive "

"You're telling me!" she answered bit-
terly. "We've been over it a hundred
times. This isn't 1892; even nice girls
know the facts of life today, and while
I'm no more anxious than the next one
to put through a deal in shopworn goods,
I still love Ned, and I don't intend to let
a single indiscretion rob us of our happi-
ness. I " the hard exterior veneer of

modernism melted from her like an
autumn ice-glaze melting in the warm
October sun, and the tears coursed down
her cheeks, cutting little valleys in her
carefully-applied make-up. "He's my
man, Doctor," she sobbed bitterly. "I've

400

WEIRD TALES

loved him since we made mud-pies to-
gether; I'm hungry, thirsty for him. He's
everything to me, and if he follows out
this fool renunciation he seems set on,
it'll kill me!"

De Grandin tweaked a waxed mus-
tache-end thoughtfully. "You exemplify
the practicality of woman, Mademoiselle:
I applaud your sound, hard common
sense," he told her. "Bring this silly
young romantic foolish one to me. I will
tell him "

"But he won't come," I interrupted.
"I know these hard -minded young
asses. When a lad is set on being
stubborn "

"Will you go to work on him if I can
get him here?" interjected Nella.

"Of a certitude, Mademoiselle: 1

"You won't think me forward or un-
maidenly?"

"This is a medical consultation,
Mademoiselle."

"All right; be in the office this time
tomorrow night. I'll have my wandering
boy friend here if I have to bring him in
an ambulance."

Her performance matched her promise
almost too closely for our comfort.
We had just finished dinner next night
when the frenzied shriek of tortured
brakes, followed by a crash and the tin-
kling spatter of smashed glass, sounded
in the street before the house, and in a
moment feet dragged heavily across the
porch. We were at the door before the
bell could buzz, and in the disk of bright-
ness sent down by the porch light saw
Nella bent half double, stumbling for-
ward with a man's arm draped across her
shoulders. His feet scuffed blindly on the
boards, as* though they had forgot the
trick of walking, or as if all strength had
left his knees. His head hung forward,
lolling drunkenly; a spate of blood ran
down his face and smeared his collar.

"Good Lord!" I gasped. "What "

"Get him in the surgery — quick!" the
girl commanded in a whisper. "I'm afraid
I rather overdid it."

Examination showed the cut across
Ned's forehead was more bloody than
extensive, while the scalp-wound which
plowed backward from his hairline
needed but a few quick stitches.

Nella whispered to us as we worked.
"I got him to go riding with me in my
runabout. Just as we got here I let out
a scream and swung the wheel hard over
to the right. I was braced for it, but Ned
was unprepared, and went right through
the windshield when I ran the car into the
curb. Lord, I thought I'd killed him when
I saw the blood — you do think he'll come
through all right, don't you, Doctor?"

"No thanks to you if he does, you
little ninny!" I retorted angrily. "You
might have cut his jugular with your con-
founded foolishness. If "

"S-s-sh, he's coming out of it!" she
warned. "Start talking to him like a
Dutdi uncle; I'll be waiting in the study
if you want me," and with a tattoo of
high heels she left us with our patient.

"Nella! Is she all right?" Ned cried
as he half roused from the surgery table.
"We had an accident "

"But certainly, Monsieur," de Grandin
soothed. "You were driving past our
house when a child ran out before your
car and Mademoiselle was forced to
swerve aside to keep from hitting it. You
were cut about the face, but she escaped
all injur)'. Here" — he raised a glass of
brandy to the patient's lips — "drink this.
Ah, so. That is better, n'est-ce-pas?"

For a moment he regarded Ned in
silence, then, abruptly: "You arc distrait,
Monsieur. When we brought you in we
were forced to give you a small whiff of
ether while we patched your cuts, and in
your delirium you said "

The color which had come into Ned's

W. T. — 1

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

401

cheeks as the fiery cognac warmed his
veins drained out again, leaving him
as ghastly as a corpse. "Did Nella
hear me?" he asked hoarsely. "Did I
blab "

"Compose yourself, Monsieur," de
Grandin bade. "She heard nothing, but
it would be well if we heard more. I
think I understand your difficulty. I am a
physician and a Frenchman and no prude.
This renunciation which you make is but
the noble gesture. You have been unfor-
tunate, and now you fear. Have courage;
no infection is so bad there is no rem-
edy "

Ned's laugh was hard and brittle as
the tinkle of a breaking glass. "I only
wish it were the tiling you think," he in-
terrupted. "I'd have you give me salvar-
san and see what happened; but there
isn't any treatment I can take for this. I'm
not delirious, and I'm not crazy, gentle-
men; I know just what I'm saying. Insane
as it may sound, I'm pledged to the dead,
and there isn't any way to bail me out."

"Eh, what is it you say?" de Grandin's
small blue eyes were gleaming with the
light of battle as he caught the occult im-
plication in Ned's declaration. "Pledged
to the dead? Comment ce/aP"

see if I could find a ghost. Good Lord,
I wanted to!

"The moon was full that night, but
the house was still as old Saint Denis
Cemetery, so after peering through the
iron grilles that shut the courtyard from
the street for half an hour or so, I started
back toward Canal Street.

"I'd almost reached Bienville Street
when just as I passed one of those funny
two-storied iron-grilled balconies so many
of the old houses have I heard some-
thing drop on the sidewalk at my feet.
It was a japonica, one of those rose-like
flowers they grow in the courtyard gar-
dens down there. When I looked up, a
girl was laughing at me from the second
story of the balcony. 'Mon fieuron, mon-
sieur, s'il vous plait' she called, stretch-
ing down a white arm for the bloom.

"The moonlight hung about her like
a veil of silver tissue, and I could see her
plainly as though it had been noon. Most
New Orleans girls are dark. She was
fair, her hair was very fine and silky and
about the color of a frosted chestnut-burr.
She wore it in a long bob with curls
around her face and neck, and I knew

ED raised himself unsteadily and
balanced on the table edge.

"It happened in New Orleans last win-
ter," he answered. "I'd finished up my
business and was on the loose, and
thought I'd walk alone through the
Vieux Carre — the old French Quarter.
I'd had dinner at Antoine's and stopped
around at the Old Absinthe House for
a few drinks, then strolled down to the
French Market for a cup of chicory coffee
and some doughnuts. Finally I walked
down Royal Street to look at Madame La-
laurie's old mansion; that's the famous
haunted house, you know. I wanted to
W. T. — 2

402

WEIRD TALES

without being told that those ringlets
weren't put in with a hot iron. Her face
was pale, colorless and fine-textured as a
magnolia petal, but her lips were brilliant
crimson. There was something remin-
iscent of those ladies you see pictured in
Directoire prints about her; small, regu-
lar features, straight, white, high-waisted
gown tied with a wide girdle underneath
her bosom, low, round-cut neck and tiny,
ball-puff sleeves tiial left her lovely arms
uncovered to the shoulder. She was like
Rose Beauharnais or Madame de Fon-
tenay, except for her fair hair, and her
eyes. Her eyes were like an Eastern
slave's, languishing and passionate, even
when she laughed. And she was laugh-
ing then, with a throaty, almost caressing
laugh as I tossed the flower up to her
and she leant across the iron railing,
snatching at it futilely as it fell just short
of reach.

" x C'est sans profit,' she laughed at
last. 'Your skill is too small or my arm
too short, m'sieur. Bring it up to me.'

" 'You mean for me to come up there?'
I asked.

" 'But certainly. I have teeth, but will
not bite you — maybe.'

"The street door to the house was
open; I pushed it back, groped my way
along a narrow hall and climbed a flight
of winding stairs. She was waiting for
me on the balcony, lovelier, close up, if
that were possible, than when I'd seen her
from the sidewalk. Her gown was China
silk, so sheer and clinging that the shad-
ow of her charming figure showed against
its rippling folds like a lovely silhouette;
the sash which bound it was a six-foot
length of rainbow ribbon tied coquettishly
beneath her shoulders and trailing in
fringed ends almost to her dress -hem at
the back; her feet were stockingless and
shod with sandals fastened with cross-
straps of purple grosgrain laced about the
ankles. Save for die small gold rings that

scintillated in her ears, she wore no orna-
ments of any kind.

" *Mon jleur, m'sieur,' she ordered
haughtily, stretching out her hand; then
her eyes lighted with sudden laughter and
she turned her back to me, bending her
head forward. 'But no, it fell into your
hands; it is that you must put in its place
again,' she ordered, pointing to a curl
where she wished the flower set. 'Come,
m'sieur, I wait upon you.'

"On the settee by the wall a guitar lay.
She picked it up and ran her slim, pale
fingers twice across the strings, sounding
a soft, melancholy chord. When she be-
gan to sing, her words were slurred and
languorous, and I had trouble under-
standing them; for the song was ancient
when Bienville turned the first spadeful
of earth diat marked the ramparts of New
Orleans :

O knights of gay Toulouse

And sweet Beaucaire,
Greet me my own true love

And speak bim fair . . .

"Her voice had the throaty, velvety
quality one hears in people of the South-
ern countries, and the words of the song
seemed fairly to yearn with the sadness
and passionate longing of the love-bereft.
But she smiled as she put by her instru-
ment, a curious smile, which heightened
the mystery of her face, and her wide eyes
seemed suddenly half questing, half
drowsy, as she asked, 'Would you ride off
upon your grim, pale horse and leave
poor little Julie d'Ayen famishing for
love, m'sieur?'

" 'Ride off from you?' I answered gal-
lantly. 'How can you ask?' A verse from
Burns came to me:

Then fare thee well, my bonny lass.

And fare thee well awhile,
And I trill come to thee again

An it were ten thousand mile.

"There was something avid in the look
she gave me. Something more than mere
gratified vanity shone in her eyes as she

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

403

turned her face up to me in the moon-
light. 'You mean it?' she demanded in
a quivering, breathless voice.

" 'Of course,' I bantered. "How could
you doubt it?'

" Then swear it — seal the oath with
blood!'

"Her eyes were almost closed, and her
lips were lightly parted as she leant to-
ward me. I could see the thin, white line
of tiny, gleaming teeth behind the lush
red of her lips; the tip of a pink tongue
swept across her mouth, leaving it
warmer, moister, redder than before; in
her throat a small pulse throbbed palpi-
tatingly. Her lips were smooth and soft
as the flower-petals in her hair, but as
they crushed on mine they seemed to
creep about them as though endowed with
a volition of their own. I could feel them
gliding almost stealthily, searching greed-
ily, it seemed, until they covered my en-
tire mouth. Then came a sudden searing
burn of pain which passed as quickly as
it flashed across my lips, and she seemed
inhaling deeply, desperately, as though to
pump the last faint gasp of breath up
from my lungs. A humming sounded in
my ears; everything went dark around
me as if I had been plunged in some
abysmal flood; a spell of dreamy lassitude
was stealing over me when she pushed
me from her so abruptly that I staggered
back against the iron railing of the gal-
lery.

f'T gasped and fought for breath like a
A winded swimmer coming from the
water, but the half -recaptured breath
seemed suddenly to catch itself unbidden
in my throat, and a tingling chill went
rippling up my spine. The girl had
dropped down to her knees, staring at
the door which let into the house, and
as I looked I saw a shadow writhe across
the little pool of moonlight which lay
upon the sill. Three feet or so in length

it was, thick through as a man's wrist,
the faint light shining dully on its scaly
armor and disclosing the forked lightning
of its darting tongue. It. was a cotton-
mouth — a water moccasin — deadly as a
rattlesnake, but more dangerous, for it
sounds no warning before striking, and
can strike when only half coiled. How
it came there on the second-story gallery
of a house so far from any swampland I
had no means of knowing, but there it
lay, bent in the design of a double S,
its wedge-shaped head swaying on up-
reared neck a scant six inches from the
girl's soft bosom, its forked tongue dart-
ing deathly menace. Half paralyzed with
fear and loathing, I stood there in a per-
fect ecstasy of horror, not daring to move
hand or foot lest I aggravate the reptile
into striking. But my terror changed to
stark amazement as my senses slowly
registered the scene. The girl was talking
to the snake and — it listened as a person
might have done!

" 'Non, non, grand' tante; halte la!'
she whispered. 'Cela est h mot — // est
devoue!'

"The serpent seemed to pause uncer-
tainly, grudgingly, as though but half
convinced, then shook its head from side
to side, much as an aged person might
when only half persuaded by a young-
ster's argument. Finally, silently as a
shadow, it slithered back again into the
darkness of the house.

"Julie bounded to her feet and put her
hands upon my shoulders.

" 'You mus' go, my friend,' she whis-
pered fiercely. 'Quickly, ere she comes
again. It was not easy to convince her;
she is old and very doubting. O, I am
afraid — afraid!'

"She hid her face against my arm, and
I could feel the throbbing of her heart
against me. Her hands stole upward to my
cheeks and pressed them between palms
as cold as graveyard clay as she whis-

404

WEIRD TALES

pered, Took at me, mon beau.' Her eyes
were dosed, her lips were slightly parted,
and beneath the arc of her long lashes I
could see the glimmer of fast-forming
tears. 'Embrasse mo? , she commanded in
a trembling breath. 'Kiss me and go quick-
ly, but O mon cher, do not forget poor
little foolish Julie d'Ayen who has put
her trust in you. Come to me again to-
morrow night!"

"I was reeling as from vertigo as I
•walked back to the Greenwald, and the
bartender looked at me suspiciously when
I ordered a sazarac. They've a strict rule
against serving drunken men at that hotel.
The liquor stung my lips like liquid
flame, and I put the cocktail down half
finished. When I set the fan to going
and switched the light on in my room I
looked into the mirror and saw two little
beads of fresh, bright blood upon my
lips. 'Good Lord!' I murmured stupidly
as I brushed the blood away; she bit me!'

"It all seemed so incredible that if I
had not seen the blood upon my mouth
I'd have thought I suffered from some
lunatic hallucination, or one too many
frappes at the Absinthe House. Julie was
as quaint and out of time as a Directoire
print, even in a city where time stands
still as it does in old New Orleans. Her
costume, her half -shy boldness, her — this
was simply madness, nothing less! — her
conversation with that snake!

'What was it she had said? My French
was none too good, and in the circum-
stances it was hardly possible to pay at-
tention to her words, but if I'd under-
stood her, she'd declared, 'He's mine; he
has dedicated himself to me!' And she'd
aaddressed that crawling horror as
* grand' t ante — great-aunt ! '

" 'Feller, you're as crazy as a cock-
roach!' I admonished my reflection in the
mirror* 'But I know what' 11 cure you.

You're taking the first train north tomor-
row morning, and if I ever catch you in
the Vie/ix Carre again, I'll '

"A sibilating hiss, no louder than the
noise made by steam escaping from a
kettle-spout, sounded close beside my
foot. There on the rug, coiled in readi-
ness to strike, was a three-foot cotton-
mouth, head swaying viciously from side
to side, wicked eyes shining in the bright
light from the chandelier. I saw the
muscles in the creature's fore-part swell,
and in a sort of horror-trance I watched
its head dart forward, but, miraculously,
it stopped its stroke half-way, and drew
its head back, turning to glance menacing-
ly at me first from one eye, then the
other. Somehow, it seemed to me, the
thing was playing with me as a cat might
play a mouse, threatening, intimidating,
letting me know it was master of the
situation and could kill me any time it
wished, but deliberately refraining from
the death-stroke.

"With one leap I was in the middle of
my bed, and when a squad of bellboys
came running in response to the frantic
call for help I telephoned, they found me
crouched against the headboard, almost
wild with fear.

"They turned the room completely in-
side out, rolling back the rugs, probing
into chairs and sofa, emptying the bureau
drawers, even taking down the towels
from the bathroom rack, but nowhere was
there any sign of the water moccasin that
had terrified me. At the end of fifteen
minutes' search they accepted half a dol-
lar each and went grinning from the
room. I knew it would be useless to
appeal for help again, for I heard one
whisper to another as they paused out-
side my door: 'It ain't right to let them
Yankees loose in N'Orleans; they don't
know how to hold their licker.'

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

405,

«T didn't take a train next morning.

JL Somehow, I'd an idea — crazy as it
seemed — that my promise to myself and
the sudden, inexplicable appearance of the
snake beside my foot were related in some
way. Just after luncheon I thought I'd
put the theory to a test.

" 'Well,' I said aloud, 'I guess I might
as well start packing. Don't want to let
the sun go down and find me here '

"My theory was right. I hadn't fin-
ished speaking when I heard the warning
hiss, and there, poised ready for the
stroke, the snake was coiled before the
door. And it was no phantom, either,
no figment of an overwrought imagina-
tion. It lay upon a rug the hotel man-
agement had placed before the door to
take the wear of constant passage from
the carpet, and I could see the high pile
of the rug crushed down beneath its
weight. It was flesh and scales — and
fangs! — and it coiled and threatened me
in my twelfth-floor room in the bright
sunlight of the afternoon.

"Little chills of terror chased each
other up my back, and I could feel the
short hairs on my neck grow stiff and
scratch against my collar, but I kept my-
self in hand. Pretending to ignore the
loathsome thing, I flung myself upon the
bed.

'* 'Oh, well,' I said aloud, 'there really
isn't any need of hurrying. I promised
Julie that I'd come to her tonight, and I
mustn't disappoint her.' Half a minute
later I roused myself upon my elbow and
glanced toward the door. The snake was
gone.

M 'Here's a letter for you, Mr. Minton,'
said the desk clerk as I paused to leave my
key. The note was on gray paper edged
with silver-gilt, and very highly scented.
The penmanship was tiny, stilted and ill-
formed, as though the author were un-
used to writing, but I could make it out:

Adore

Meet me in St. Denis Cemetery at sunset
A vous de coeur pour I'^ternite

Julie

"I stuffed the note back in my pocket.
The more I thought about the whole
affair the less I liked it. The flirtation had
begun harmlessly enough, and Julie was
as lovely and appealing as a figure in a
fairy-tale, but there are unpleasant aspects
to most fairy-tales, and this was no ex-
ception. That scene last night when she
had seemed to argue with a full-grown
cottonmouth, and the mysterious appear-
ance of the snake whenever I spoke of
breaking my promise to go back to her
— there was something too much like
black magic in it. Now she addressed me
as her adored and signed herself for
eternity; finally named a graveyard as our
rendezvous. Things had become a little
bit too thick.

"I was standing at the corner of Canal
and Baronne Streets, and crowds of office
workers and late shoppers elbowed past
me. 'I'll be damned if I'll meet her in
a cemetery, or anywhere else,' I mut-
tered. 'I've had enough of all this non-
sense '

"A woman's shrill scream, echoed by a
man's hoarse shout of terror, interrupted
me. On the marble pavement of Canal
Street, with half a thousand people bus-
tling by, lay coiled a three- foot water
moccasin. Here was proof. I'd seen it
twice in my room at the hotel, but I'd
been alone each time. Some form of
weird hypnosis might have made me
think I saw it, but the screaming woman
and the shouting man, these panic-stricken
people in Canal Street, couldn't all be
victims of a spell which had been cast
on me. 'AH right, I'll go,' I almost
shouted, and instantly, as though it been
but a puff of smoke, the snake was gone,
the half-fainting woman and a crowd of

406

WEIRD TALES

curious bystanders asking what was wrong
left to prove I had not been the victim
of some strange delusion.

£t /~V ld Saint Denis Cemetery lay drows-
V-/ ing in the blue, faint twilight. It
has no graves as we know them, for
when the city was laid out it was below
sea-level and bodies were stored away in
crypts set row on row like lines of pigeon-
holes in walls as thick as those of me-
diaeval castles. Grass-grown aisles run
between the rows of vaults, and the
effect is a true city of the dead with nar-
row streets shut in by close-set houses.
The rattle of a trolley car in Rampart
Street came to me faintly as I walked
between the rows of tombs; from the
river came the mellow- throated bellow
of a steamer's whistle, but both sounds
were muted as though heard from a great
distance. The tomb-lined bastions of
Saint Denis hold the present out as firmly
as they hold the memories of the past
within.

"Down one aisle and up another I
walked, the close-clipped turf deadening
my footfalls so I might have been a ghost
come back to haunt the ancient burial
ground, but nowhere was there sign or
trace of Julie. I made the circuit of the
labyrinth and finally paused before one
of the more pretentious tombs.

" 'Looks as if she'd stood me up,' I
murmured. 'If she has, I have a good
excuse to '

" 'But non, mon coeur, I have not dis-
appointed you!' a soft voice whispered in
my ear. 'See, I am here.'

"I think I must have jumped at sound
of her greeting, for she clapped her hands
delightedly before she put them on my
shoulders and turned her face up for a
kiss. 'Silly one,' she chided, 'did you
think your Julie was unfaithful?'

"I put her hands away as gently as I
could, for her utter self-surrender was

embarrassing. 'Where were you?' I asked,
striving to make neutral conversation.
Tve been prowling round this graveyard
for the last half -hour, and came through
this aisle not a minute ago, but I didn't
see you '

" 'Ah, but I saw you, cberi; I have
watched you as you made your solemn
rounds like a watchman of the night.
Ohe, but it was hard to wait until the
sun went down to greet you, mon petit!'

"She laughed again, and her mirth was
mellowly musical as the gurgle of cool
water poured from a silver vase.

" 'How could you have seen me?' I
demanded. 'Where were you all this
time?'

' "But here, of course,' she answered
naively, resting one hand against the
graystone slab that sealed the tomb.

"I shook my head bewilderedly. The
tomb, like all the others in the deeply
recessed wall, was of rough cement in-
crusted with small seashells, and its sides
were straight and blank without a spear
of ivy clinging to them. A sparrow could
not have found cover there, yet . . .

"Julie raised herself on tiptoe and
stretched her arms out right and left
while she looked at me through half-
closed, smiling eyes. ']e suts engourdie —
I am stiff with sleep,' she told me, stifling
a yawn. 'But now that you are come, mon
chef, I am wakeful as the pussy-cat that
rouses at the scampering of the mouse.
Come, let us walk in this garden of mine.'
She linked her arm through mine and
started down the grassy, grave-lined path.

"Tiny shivers — not of cold — were
flickering through my cheeks and down
my neck beneath my ears. I had to have
an explanation . . . the snake, her declara-
tion that she watched me as I searched
the cemetery — and from a tomb where a
beetle could not have found a hiding-
place — her announcement she was still
stiff from sleeping, now her reference

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

407

to a half-forgotten graveyard as her gar-
den.

" 'See here, I want to know ' I

started, but she laid her hand across my
lips.

" 'Do not ask to know too soon, mon
coeur' she bade. 'Look at me, am I not
veritably elegante?' She stood back a step,
gathered up her skirts and swept me a
deep curtsy.

"There was no denying she was beauti-
ful. Her tightly curling hair had been
combed high and tied back with a fillet
of bright violet tissue which bound her
brows like a diadem and at the front of
which an aigret plume was set. In her
ears were hung two beautifully matched
cameos, outlined in gold and seed-pearls,
and almost large as silver dollars; a neck-
lace of antique dull-gold hung round her
throat, and its pendant was a duplicate of
her ear-cameos, while a bracelet of matt-
gold set with a fourth matched anaglyph
was clasped about her left arm just above
the elbow. Her gown was sheer white
muslin, low cut at front and back, with
little puff-sleeves at the shoulders, fitted
tightly at the bodice and flaring sharply
from a high-set waist. Over it she wore
a narrow scarf of violet silk, hung be-
hind her neck and dropping down on
either side in front like a clergyman's
stole. Her sandals were gilt leather, heel-
less as a ballet dancer's shoes and laced
with violet ribbons. Her lovely, pearl-
white hands were bare of rings, but on
the second toe of her right foot there
showed a little cameo which matched the
others which she wore.

"I could feel my heart begin to pound
and my breath come quicker as I looked
at her, but:

" 'You look as if you're going to a
masquerade,' I said.

"A look of hurt surprize showed in
her eyes. 'A masquerade?' she echoed.
'But no, it is my best, my very finest,

that I wear for you tonight, mon adore.
Do not you like it; do you not love me,
Edouard?'

" 'No,' I answered shortly, 'I do not.
We might as well understand each other,
Julie. I'm not in love with you and I
never was. It's been a pretty flirtation,
nothing more. I'm going home tomor-
row, and '

" 'But you will come again? Surely you
will come again?' she pleaded. 'You can-
not mean it when you say you do not
love me, £douard. Tell me that you
spoke so but to tease me '

"A warning hiss sounded in the grass
beside my foot, but I was too angry to be
frightened. 'Go ahead, set your devilish
snake on me," I taunted. "Let it bite me.
I'd as soon be dead as '

"The snake was quick, but Julie
quicker. In the split-second required for
the thing to drive at me she leaped
across the grass-grown aisle and pushed
me back. So violent was the shove she
gave me that I fell against the tomb,
struck my head against a small projecting
stone and stumbled to my knees. As I
fought for footing on the slippery grass
I saw the deadly, wedge-shaped head
strike full against the girl's bare ankle
and heard her gasp with pain. The snake
recoiled and swung its head toward me,
but Julie dropped down to her knees and
spread her arms protectingly about me.

" 'Non, non, grand' tante!' she

screamed; 'not this one! Let me ' Her

voice broke on a little gasp and with a
retching hiccup she sank limply to the
grass.

"I tried to rise, but my foot slipped on
the grass and I fell back heavily against
the tomb, crashing my brow against its
shell-set cement wall. I saw Julie lying
in a little huddled heap of white against
the blackness of the sward, and, shadowy
but clearly visible, an aged, wrinkled *-
Negress with turbaned head and cambric.

408

WEIRD TALES

apron bending over her, nursing her head
against her bosom and rocking back and
forth grotesquely while she aooned a
wordless threnody. Where had she come
from? I wondered idly. Where had the
snake gone? Why did the moonlight
seem to fade and flicker like a dying
lamp? Once more I tried to rise, but
slipped back to the grass before the tomb
as everything went black before me.

"The lavender light of early morning
was streaming over the tomb-walls of the
cemetery when I waked. I lay quiet for
a little while, wondering sleepily how I
came there. Then, just as the first rays of
the sun shot through the thinning shad-
ows, I remembered. Julie! The snake
had bitten her when she flung herself be-
fore me. She was gone; the old Negress
— where had she come from? — was gone,
too, and I was utterly alone in the old
graveyard.

'"Stiff from lying on the ground, I got
myself up awkwardly, grasping at the
flower-shelf projecting from the tomb.
As my eyes came level with the slab that
sealed the crypt I felt the breath catch in
my throat. The crypt, like all its fellows,
looked for all the world like an old oven
let into a brick wall overlaid with peel-
ing plaster. The sealing- stone was prob-
ably once white, but years had stained it
to a dirty gray, and time had all but
nibbed its legend out. Still, I could see
the faint inscription carved in quaint,
old-fashioned letters, and disbelief gave
way to incredulity, which was replaced
by panic terror as I read:

lei repose malbeureusement
Julie Amelie Marie d'Ayen
Rationale de Paris France
Nee le 29 Aoul 1788
Dice die a la N O U 2 Juillet 1807

"Julie! Little Julie whom I'd held in
my arms, whose mouth had lain on mine
in eager kisses, was a corpse! Dead and
in ker grave more than a centuryl"

The silence lengthened. Ned stared
miserably before him, his outward
eyes unseeing, but his mind's eye turned
upon that scene in old Saint Denis Cem-
etery. De Grandin tugged and tugged
again at the ends of his mustache till I
thought he'd drag the hairs out by the
roots. I could think of nothing which
might ease the tension till:

"Of course, the name cut on the tomb-
stone was a piece of pure coincidence,' I
ha2arded. "Most likely the young
woman deliberately assumed it to mis-
lead you "

"And the snake which threatened our
young friend, he was an assumption,
also, one infers?" de Grandin inter-
rupted.

"N-o, but it could have been a trick.
Ned saw an aged Negress in the cem-
etery, and those old Southern darkies
have strange powers "

"I damn think that you hit the thumb
upon the nail that time, my friend," the
little Frenchman nodded, "though you do
not realize how accurate your diagnosis
is." To Ned:

"Have you seen this snake again since
coming North?"

"Yes," Ned replied. "I have. I was
too stunned to speak when I read the
epitaph, and I wandered back to the
hotel in a sort of daze and packed my
bags in silence. Possibly that's why there
was no further visitation there. I don't
know. I do know nothing further hap-
pened, though, and when several months
had passed with nothing but my mem-
ories to remind me of the incident, I be-
gan to think I'd suffered from some sort
of walking nightmare. Nella and I went
ahead with preparations for our wedding,
but three weeks ago the postman brought
me this "

He reached into an inner pocket and
drew out an envelope. It was of soft gray

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

409

paper, edged with silver-gilt, and the ad-
dress was in tiny, almost unreadable
script:

M. EdouarcJ Minton,
30 Rue Carteret 30,
Harrisonville, N. J.

"U'm?" de Grandin commented as he
inspected it. "It is addressed a la jran-
faise. And the letter, may one read it?"

"Of course," Ned answered. "I'd like
you to."

Across de Grandin's shoulder I made
out the hastily-scrawled missive:

Adore

Remember your promise and the kiss of blood
that sealed it. Soon I shall call and you must
come.

Pour le temps el pour I'eternite,

Julie.

"You recognize the writing?" de Gran-
din asked. "It is "

"Oh, yes," Ned answered bitterly. "I
recognize it; it's the same the other note
was written in."

"And then?"

The boy smiled bleakly. "I crushed
the thing into a ball and threw it on the
floor and stamped on it. Swore I'd die
before I'd keep another rendezvous with

her, and " He brok« off, and put

trembling hands up to his face.

"The so mysterious serpent came
again, one may assume?" de Grandin
prompted.

"But it's only a phantom snake," I
interjected. "At worst it's nothing more
than a terrifying vision "

"Think so?" Ned broke in. "D'ye re-
member Rowdy, my airedale terrier?"

I nodded.

"He was in the room when I opened
this letter, and when the cottonmouth
appeared beside me on the floor he made
a dash for it. Whether it would have
struck me I don't know, but it struck at
him as he leaped and caught him squarely

in the throat. He thrashed and fought,
and the thing held on with locked jaws
till I grabbed a fire-shovel and made for
it; then, before I could strike, it van-
ished.

"But its venom didn't. Poor old
Rowdy was dead before I could get him
out of the house, but I took his corpse to
Doctor Kirchoff, the veterinary, and told
him Rowdy died suddenly and I wanted
him to make an autopsy. He went back
to his operating-room and stayed there
half an hour. When he came back to
the office he was wiping his glasses and
wore the most astonished look I've ever
seen on a human face. 'You say your dog
died suddenly — in the house?' he asked.

V 'Yes,' I told him; 'just rolled over
and died.'

" 'Well, bless my soul, that's the most
amazing thing I ever heard!' he an-
swered. 'I can't account for it. That dog
died from snake-bite; copperhead, I'd
say, and the marks of the fangs show
plainly on his throat' "

"But I thought you said it was a
water moccasin," I objected. "Now
Doctor Kirchoff says it was a copper-
head "

"Ah bah!" de Grandin laughed a
thought unpleasantly. "Did no one ever
tell you that the copperhead and mocca-
sin are of close kind, my friend? Have
not you heard some ophiologists maintain
the moccasin is but a dark variety of
copperhead?" He did not pause for my
reply, but turned again to Ned:

"One understands your chivalry, Mon-
sieur. For yourself you have no fear,
since after all at times life can be bought
too dearly, but the death of your small
dog has put a different aspect on the
matter. If this never-to-be-sufficiently-
anathematized serpent which comes and
goes like the boite a surprise — the how
do you call him? Jack from the box? — is
enough a ghost thing to appear at any

410

WEIRD TALES

time and place it wills, but sufficiently
physical to exude venom which will kill a
strong and healthy terrier, you have the
fear for Mademoiselle Nella, n'est-ce-
pas?"

"Precisely, you "

"And you are well advised to have the
caution, my young friend. We face a
serious condition."

"What do you advise?"

The Frenchman teased his needle-
point mustache-tip with a thoughtful
thumb and forefinger. "For the present,
nothing," lie replied at length. "Let me
look this situation over; let me view it
from all angles. Whatever I might tell
you now would probably be wrong. Sup-
pose we meet again one week from now.
By that time I should have my data well
in hand."

"And in the meantime "

"Continue to be coy with Mademoiselle
Nella. Perhaps it would be well if you
recalled important business which re-
quires that you leave town till you hear
from me again. There is no need to put
her life in peril at this time."

• <{ Tf it weren't for Kirchoff's testimony
"■-I'd say Ned Minton had gone raving
crazy," I declared as the door closed on
our visitors. "The whole thing's wilder
than an opium smoker's dream — that
meeting with the girl in New Orleans,
the snake that comes and disappears, the
assignation in the cemetery — it's all too
preposterous. But I know Kirchoff. He's
as unimaginative as a side of sole-
leather, and as efficient as he is unim-
aginative. If he says Minton's dog died
of snake-bite that's what it died of,
but the whole affair's so utterly fantas-
tic "

"Agreed," de Grandin nodded; "but
what is fantasy but the appearance of
mental images as such, severed from or-

dinary relations? The 'ordinary relations'
of images are those to which we are ac-
customed, which conform to our experi-
ence. The wider that experience, the
more ordinary will we find extraordinary
relations. By example, take yourself: You
sit in a dark auditorium and see a rail-
way train come rushing at you. Now, it
is not at all in ordinary experience for
a locomotive to come dashing in a theater
filled with people, it is quite otherwise;
but you keep your seat, you do not flinch,
you are not frightened. It is nothing but
a motion picture, which you understand.
But if you were a savage from New
Guinea you would rise and fly in panic
from this steaming, shrieking iron mon-
ster which bears down on you. Tiens, it
is a matter of experience, you see. To
you it is an everyday event, to the sav-
age it would be a new and terrifying
thing.

"Or, perhaps, you are at the hospital.
You place a patient between you and the
Crookes' tube of an X-ray, you turn on
the current, you observe him through the
fluoroscope and pouf! his flesh all melts
away and his bones spring out in sharp
relief. Three hundred years ago you
would have howled like a stoned dog at
the sight, and prayed to be delivered
from the witchcraft which produced it.
Today you curse and swear like twenty
drunken pirates if the Rontgenologist is
but thirty seconds late in setting up the
apparatus. These things are 'scientific,*
you understand their underlying form-
ula?, therefore they seem natural. But
mention what you please to call the oc-
cult, and you scoff, and that is but ad-
mitting that you are opposed to some-
thing which you do not understand. The
credible and believable is that to which
we are accustomed, the fantastic and in-
credible is what we cannot explain in
terms of previous experience. Voila, c'est.
tres simple, n'est-ce- pas?"

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

"You mean to say you understand all
this?"

"Not at all by any means; I am clever,
me, but not that clever. No, my friend, I
am as much in the dark as you, only I do
not refuse to credit what our young
friend tells us. I believe the things he
has related happened, exactly as he has
recounted them. I do not understand,
but I believe. Accordingly, I must probe,
I must sift, I must examine this matter.
We see it now as a group of unrelated
and irrelevant occurrences, but some-
where lies the key which will enable us
to make harmony from this discord, to
gather these stray, tangled threads into
an ordered pattern. I go to seek that
key."

"Where?"

"To New Orleans, of course. Tonight
I pack my portmanteaux, tomorrow I en-
train. Just now" — he smothered a tre-
mendous yawn — "now I do what every
wise man does as often as he can. I take
a drink."

Seven evenings later we gathered in
my study, de Grandin, Ned and I,
and from the little Frenchman's shining
eyes I knew his quest had been pro-
ductive of results.

"My friends," he told us solemnly,
"I am a clever person, and a lucky one,
as well. The morning after my arrival at
New Orleans I enjoyed three Ramos
fizzes, then went to sit in City Park by
the old Dueling-Oak and wished with all
my heart that I had taken four. And
while I sat in self-reproachful thought,
sorrowing for the drink that I had
missed, behold, one passed by whom I
recognized. He was my old schoolfellow,
Paul Dubois, now a priest in holy orders
and attached to the Cathedral of Saint
Louis.

"He took me to his quarters, that
good, pious man, and gave me luncheon.

It was Friday and a fast day, so we
fasted. Mon Dieu, but we did fast! On
Creole gumbo and oysters a la Rocke-
feller, and baked pompano and little
shrimp fried crisp in olive oil and chicory
salad and seven different kinds of cheese
and wine. When we were so filled with
fasting that we could not eat another
morsel my old friend took me to another
priest, a native of New Orleans whose
stock of local lore was second only to his
marvelous capacity for fine champagne.
Morbleu, how I admire that one! And
now, attend me very carefully, my
friends. What he disclosed to me makes
many hidden mysteries all clear:

"In New Orleans there lived a wealthy
family named d'Ayen. They possessed
much gold and land, a thousand slaves
or more, and one fair daughter by the
name of Julie. When this country bought
the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon
and your army came to occupy the forts,
this young girl fell in love with a young
officer, a Lieutenant Philip Merriwell.
Tenez, army love in those times was no
different than it is today, it seems. This
gay young lieutenant, he came, he wooed,

412

WEIRD TALES

he won, he rode away, and little Julie
wept and sighed and finally died of
heartbreak. In her lovesick illness she
had for constant company a slave, an old
mulatress known to most as Maman Dra-
gonne, but to Julie simply as grand' tante,
great-aunt. She had nursed our little
Julie at the breast, and all her life she
fostered and attended her. To her little
white 'mams ell e' she was all gentleness
and kindness, but to others she was fierce
and frightful, for she was a 'con j on
woman," adept at obeah, the black magic
of the Congo, and among the blacks she
ruled as queen by force of fear, while the
whites were wont to treat her with re-
spect and, it was more than merely whis-
pered, retain her services upon occasion.
She could sell protection to die duelist,
and he who bore her charm would surely
conquer on the field of honor; she
brewed love-drafts which turned the
hearts and heads of the most capricious
coquettes or the most constant wives, as
occasion warranted; by merely staring
fixedly at someone she could cause him to
take sick and die, and — here we com-
mence to tread upon our own terrain —
she was said to have the power of chang-
ing to a snake at will.

"Very good. You follow? When poor
young Julie died of heartbreak it was old
Maman Dragonne — the little white one's
grand' tan te — who watched beside her
bed. It is said she stood beside her mis-
tress' coffin and called a curse upon the
fickle lover; swore he would come back
and die beside the body of the sweetheart
he deserted. She also made a prophecy.
Julie should have many loves, but her
body should not know corruption nor her
spirit rest until she could find one to
keep his promise and return to her with
words of love upon his lips. Those who
failed her should die horribly, but he
who kept his pledge would bring her
rest and peace. This augury she made

while she stood beside her mistress' cof-
fin just before they sealed it in the tomb
in old Saint Denis Cemetery. Then she
disappeared."

"You mean she ran away?" I asked.

"I mean she disappeared, vanished,
evanesced, evaporated. She was never
seen again, not even by the people who
stood next to her when she pronounced
her prophecy."

"But "

"No buts, my friend, if you will be so
kind. Years later, when the British
stormed New Orleans, Lieutenant Merri-
well was there with General Andrew
Jackson. He survived the battle like a
man whose life is charmed, though all
around him comrades fell and three
horses were shot under him. Then, when
the strife was done, he went to the grand
banquet tendered to the victors. While
gayety was at its height he abruptly left
the table. Next morning he was found
upon the grass before the tomb of Julie
d'Ayen. He was dead. He died from
snake-bite.

"The years marched on and stories
spread about the town, stories of a
strange and lovely belle dame sans mere/,
a modem Circe who lured young gallants
to their doom. Time and again some
gay young blade of New Orleans would
boast a conquest. Passing late at night
through Royal Street, he would have a
flower dropped to him as he walked
underneath a balcony. He would meet a
lovely girl dressed in the early Empire
style, and be surprized at the ease with
which he pushed his suit; then — upon the
trees in Chartres Street appeared his fun-
eral notices. He was dead, invariably he
was dead of snake-bite. Parbleu, it got to
be a saying that he who died mysteriously
must have met the Lady of the Moon-
light as he walked through Royal Street!"

He paused and poured a thimbleful of

brandy in his coffee. "You see?" he
asked.

"No, I'm shot if I do!" I answered.
"I can't see the connection between "

"Night and breaking dawn, perhaps?"
he asked sarcastically. "If two and two
make four, my friend, and even you will
not deny they do, then these tilings I
have told you give an explanation of our
young friend's trouble. This girl he met
was most indubitably Julie, poor little
Julie d'Ayen on whose tombstone it is
carved: lei repose malheureusement —
here lies unhappily.' The so mysterious
snake which menaces young Monsieur
Minton is none other than the aged Ma-
man Dragonne — grand' tante, as Julie
called her."

"But Ned's already failed to keep his
tryst," I objected. "Why didn't this
snake-woman sting him in the hotel,
or "

"Do you recall what Julie said when
first the snake appeared?" he interrupted.
'Not this one, grand 'tante!' And again,
in the old cemetery when the serpent
actually struck at him, she threw herself
before him and received the blow. It
could not permanently injure her; to
earthly injuries the dead are proof, but
the shock of it caused her to swoon, it
seems. Monsieur," he bowed to Ned,
"you are more fortunate than any of
those others. Several times you have been
close to death, but each time you escaped.
You have been given chance and chance
again to keep your pledged word to the
dead, a thing no other faithless lover of
the little Julie ever had. It seems, Mon-
sieur, this dead girl truly loves you."

"How horrible!" I muttered.

"You said it, Doctor Trowbridge!"
Ned seconded. "It looks as if I'm in a
spot, all right."

"Mais non," de Grandin contradicted.
"Escape is obvious, my friend."

"How, in heaven's name?"
"Keep your promised word; go back to
her."

"Good Lord, I can't do that! Go back
to a corpse, take her in my arms — kiss
her?"

"Certainement, why not?"

"Why— why, she's dead!"

"Is she not beautiful?"

"She's lovely and alluring as a siren's
song. I think she's the most exquisite

thing I've ever seen, but " he rose

and walked unsteadily across the room.
"If it weren't for Nella," he said slowly,
"I might not find it hard to follow your
advice. Julie's sweet and beautiful, and
artless and affectionate as a child; kind,
too, the way she stood between me and
that awful snake-thing, but — oh, it's out
of the question!"

"Then we must expand the question to
accommodate it, my friend. For the
safety of the living — for Mademoiselle
Nella's sake — and for the repose of the
dead, you must keep the oath you swore
to little Julie d'Ayen. You must go back
to New Orleans and keep your ren-
dezvous."

The dead of old Saint Denis lay in
dreamless sleep beneath the palely
argent rays of the fast- waxing moon. The
oven-like tombs were gay with hardly-
wilted flowers; for two days before was
All Saints' Day, and no grave in all New
Orleans is so lowly, no dead so long in-
terred, that pious hands do not bear blos-
soms of remembrance to them on that
feast of memories.

De Grandin had been busily engaged
all afternoon, making mysterious trips to
the old Negro quarter in company with
a patriarchal scion of Indian and Negro
ancestry who professed ability to guide
him to the city's foremost practitioner
of voodoo; returning to the hotel only

414

WEIRD TALES

to dash out again to consult his friend at
the Cathedral; coming back to stare with
thoughtful eyes upon the changing pan-
orama of Canal Street while Ned, nerv-
ous as a race-horse at the barrier, tramped
up and down the room lighting cigarette
from cigarette and drinking absinthe
frappes alternating with sharp, bitter saz-
arac cocktails till I wondered that he did
not fall in utter alcoholic collapse. By
evening I had that eery feeling that the
sane experience when alone with mad
folk. I was ready to shriek at any un-
expected noise or turn and run at sight
of a strange shadow.

"My friend," de Grandin ordered as
we reached the grass-paved corridor of
tombs where Ned had told us the d'Ayen
vaults were, "I suggest that you drink
this." From an inner pocket he drew
out a tiny flask of ruby glass and snapped
its stopper loose. A strong and slightly
acrid scent came to me, sweet and spicy,
faintly reminiscent of the odor of the
aromatic herbs one smells about a mum-
my's wrappings.

"Thanks, I've had enough to drink al-
ready," Ned said shortly.

"You are informing me, mon vieux?"
the little Frenchman answered with a
smile. "It is for that I brought this draft
along. It will help you draw yourself
together. You have need of all your
faculties this time, believe me."

Ned put the bottle to his lips, drained
its contents, hiccuped lightly, then braced
his shoulders. "That // a pick-up," he
complimented. "Too bad you didn't let
me have it sooner, sir. I think I can go
through the ordeal now."

"One is sure you can," the Frenchman
answered confidently. "Walk slowly
toward the spot where you last saw Julie,
if you please. We shall await you here,
in easy call if we are needed."

The aisle of tombs was empty as Ned

left us. The turf had been fresh-mown
for the day of visitation and was as
smooth and short as a lawn tennis court.
A field-mouse could not have run across
the pathway without our seeing it. This
much I noticed idly as Ned trudged
away from us, walking more like a man
on his way to the gallows than one who
went to keep a lovers' rendezvous . . .
and suddenly he was not alone. There
was another with him, a girl dressed in
a clinging robe of sheer white muslin
cut in the charming fashion of the First
Empire, girdled high beneath the bosom
with a sash of light-blue ribbon. A
wreath of pale gardenias lay upon her
bright, fair hair; her slender arms were
pearl-white in the moonlight. As she
stepped toward Ned I thought involun-
tarily of a line from Sir John Suckling:

'"Her feet . . . like little mice stole in and out."

"Edouard, cheri! 0, coeitr de mon
coeur, (fest veritablement toi? Thou hast
come willingly, unasked, petit amant?''

"I'm here," Ned answered steadily,

"but only " He paused and drew a

sudden gasping breath, as though a hand
had been laid on his throat.

"Cheri," the girl asked in a trembling
voice, "you are cold to me; do not you
love me, then — you are not here because
your heart heard say heart calling? O
heart of my heart's heart, if you but knew
how I have longed and waited! It has
been triste, mon Edouard, lying in my
narrow bed alone while winter rains and
summer suns beat down, listening for your
footfall. I could have gone out at my
pleasure whenever moonlight made the
nights all bright with silver; I could have
sought for other lovers, but I would not.
You held release for me within your
hands, and if I might not have it from
you I would forfeit it for ever. Do not
you bring release for me, my Cdouard?
Say that it is so!"

PLEDGED TO THE DEAD

An odd look came into the boy's face.
He might have seen her for the first
time, and been dazzled by her beauty and
the winsome sweetness of her voice.

"Julie!" he whispered softly. "Poor,
patient, faithful little Julie!"

In a single stride he crossed the inter-
vening turf and was on his knees before
her, kissing her hands, the hem of her
gown, her sandaled feet, and babbling
half -coherent, broken words of love.

She put her hands upon his head as if
in benediction, then turned them, hold-
ing them palm-forward to his lips, finally
crooked her fingers underneath his chin
and raised his face. "Nay, love, sweet
love, art thou a worshipper and I a saint
that thou should kneel to me?" she
asked him tenderly. "See, my lips are
famishing for thine, and wilt thou waste
thy kisses on my hands and feet and
garment? Make haste, my heart, we have
but little time, and I would know the
kisses of redemption ere "

They clung together in the moonlight,
her white-robed, lissome form and his
somberly-clad body seemed to melt and
merge in one while her hands reached up
to clasp his cheeks and draw his face
down to her yearning, scarlet mouth.

De Grandin was reciting something in
a mumbling monotone; his words were
scarcely audible, but I caught a phrase
occasionally: ". . . rest eternal grant to
her, O Lord ... let light eternal shine
upon her . . . from the gates of hell her
soul deliver . . . Kyrie eleison ..."

"Julie!" we heard Ned's despairing cry,
and:

"Ha, it comes, it has begun; it fin-
ishes!" de Grandin whispered gratingly.

The girl had sunk down to the grass
as though she swooned; one arm had
fallen limply from Ned's shoulder, but
the other still was clasped about his neck
as we raced toward them. "Adieu, mon
amourenx; adieu pour ce monde, adieu

pour I'autre; adieu pour I'eternite!" we
heard her sob. When we reached him,
Ned knelt empty-armed before the tomb.
Of Julie there was neither sign nor trace.

"So, assist him, if you will, my
friend," de Grandin bade, motioning me
to take Ned's elbow. "Help him to the
gate. I follow quickly, but first I have a
task to do."

As I led Ned, staggering like a
drunken man, toward the cemetery exit,
I heard the clang of metal striking metal
at the tomb behind us.

"\\T HAT did you stop Behind to do?"

▼ ▼ I asked as we prepared for bed
at the hotel.

He flashed his quick, infectious smile
at me, and tweaked his mustache ends,
for all the world like a self-satisfied tom-
cat furbishing his whiskers after finish-
ing a bowl of cream. "There was an
alteration to that epitaph I had to make.
You recall it read, 'lei repose malheur-
eusement — here lies unhappily Julie
d'Ayen'? That is no longer true. I chis-
eled off the malheureusement. Thanks to
Monsieur Edouard's courage and my
cleverness the old one's prophecy was ful-
filled tonight; and poor, small Julie has
found rest at last. Tomorrow morning
they celebrate the first of a series of mass-
es I have arranged for her at the Cathe-
dral."

"What was that drink you gave Ned
just before he left us?" I asked curiously.
"It smelled like "

"Le bon Dieu and the devil know —
not I," he answered with a grin. "It was
a voodoo love-potion. I found the reali-
zation that she had been dead a century
and more so greatly troubled our young
friend that he swore he could not be af-
fectionate to our poor Julie; so I went
down to the Negro quarter in the after-
noon and arranged to have a philtre
brewed. Eb bien, that aged black one

416

WEIRD TALES

xvho concocted it assured me that she
could inspire love for the image of a
crocodile in the heart of anyone who
looked upon it after taking but a drop
of her decoction, and she charged me
twenty dollars for it. But I think I had
my money's worth. Did it not work mar-
velously?"

"Then Julie's really gone? Ned's com-
ing back released her from the spell "

"Not wholly gone," he corrected.
"Her little body now is but a small hand-
ful of dust, her spirit is no longer earth-
bound, and the familiar demon who in
life was old Maman Dragonne has left
the earth with her, as well. No longer
will she metamorphosize into a snake and
kill the faithless ones who kiss her little
mistress and then forswear their troth,

but — non. my friend, Julie is not gone
entirely, I think. In the years to come
when Ned and Nella have long been
joined in wedded bliss, there will be
minutes when Julie's face and Julie's
voice and the touch of Julie's little hands
will haunt his memory. There will always
be one little corner of his heart which
never will belong to Madame Nella Min-
ton, for it will be for ever Julie's. Yes, I
think that it is so."

Slowly, deliberately, almost ritualistic-
ally, he poured a glass of wine and raised
it. "To you, my little poor one," he said
softly as he looked across the sleeping
city toward old Saint Denis Cemetery.
"You quit earth with a kiss upon your
lips; may you sleep serene in Paradise
until another kiss shall waken you."

w

hich Will Scarcely Be
Understood

By ROBERT E. HOWARD

Small poets sing of little, foolish tilings,
As more befitting to a shallow brain
That dreams not of the pre-Atlantean kings,
Nor launches on that dark uncharted Main
That holds grim islands and unholy tides,
Where many a black mysterious secret hidts.

True rime concerns her not with bursting buds,
The chirping bird, the lifting of the rose —
Save ebon blooms that swell in ghastly woods,
And that grim, voiceless bird that ever broods
Where through black boughs a wind of horror blows.

W. T. — 2

WHICH WILL SCARCELY BE UNDERSTOOD 417

Oh, little singers, what know you of those
Ungodly, slimy shapes that glide and crawl
Out of unreckoned gulfs when midnights fall,
To haunt the poet's slumbering, and close
Against his eyes thrust up their hissing head,
And mock him with their eyes so serpent-red?

Conceived and bred in blackened pits of hell,
The poems come that set the stars on fire;
Born of black maggots writhing in a shell
Men call a poet's skull — an iron bell
Filled up with burning mist and golden mire.

The royal purple is a moldy shroud;
The laurel crown is cypress fixed with thorns;
The sword of fame, a sickle notched and dull ;
The face of beauty is a grinning skull ;
And ever in their souls' red caverns loud
The rattle of the cloven hoofs and horns.

The poets know that justice is a lie,

That good and light are baubles filled with dust —

This world's slave-market where swine sell and buy,

This shambles where the howling cattle die,

Has blinded not their eyes with lies and lust.

Ring up the demons from the lower Pit,
Since Evil conquers goodness in the end ;
Break down the Door and let the fires be lit,
And greet each slavering monster as a friend.

Let obscene shapes of Darkness ride the earth,
Let sacrificial smokes blot out the skies,
Let dying virgins glut the Black Gods' eyes,
And all the world resound with noisome mirth.

Break down the altars, let the streets run red,
Tramp down die race into the crawling slime;
Then where red Chaos lifts her serpent head,
The Fiend be praised, we'll pen the perfect rime.

W. T.— 3

Wie

hunned House

By H. P. LOVECRAFT

r A posthumous story of Immense power, written by a master of weird fiction —
a tale of a revolting horror in the cellar of an old-
house in New England

FROM even the greatest of horrors
irony is seldom absent. Sometimes
it enters directly into the composi-
tion of the events, while sometimes it
relates only to their fortuitous position
among persons and places. The latter
sort is splendidly exemplified by a case
in the ancient city of Providence, where
in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used
to sojourn often during his unsuccessful
wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whit-
man. Poe generally stopped at the Man-
sion House in Benefit Street — the re-
named Golden Ball Inn whose roof has
sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and
Lafayette — and his favorite walk led
northward along the same street to Mrs.
Whitman's home and the neighboring
hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose

• Howard Phillips Lovecraft died
last March, at the height of his ca-
reer. Though only forty-six years of
age, he had built up an international
reputation by the artistry and im-
peccable literary craftsmanship of
his weird tales; and he was regarded
on both sides of the Atlantic as prob-
ably the greatest contemporary mas-
ter of weird fiction. His ability to
create and sustain a mood of brood-
ing dread and unnamable horror is
nowhere better shown than in the
posthumous tale presented here:
"The Shunned House."

418

hidden expanse of Eighteenth Century
gravestones had for him a peculiar fas-
cination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so
many times repeated, the world's great-
est master of the terrible and the bizarre
was obliged to pass a particular house
on the eastern side of the street; a ding)-,
antiquated structure perched on the
abruptly rising side hill, with a great
unkempt yard dating from a time when
the region was partly open country. It
does not appear that he ever wrote or
spoke of it, nor is there any evidence
that he even noticed it. And yet that
house, to the two persons in possession
of certain information, equals or out-
ranks in horror the wildest fantasy of the
genius who so often passed it unknow-
ingly, and stands starkly leering as a
symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was — and for that matter
still is — of a kind to attract the attention
of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-
farm building, it followed the average
New England colonial lines of the middle
Eighteenth Century — the prosperous
peaked-roof sort, with two stories and
dormerless attic, and with the Georgian
doorway and interior panelling dictated
by the progress of taste at that time. It
faced south, with one gable end buried
to the lower windows in the eastward
rising hill, and the other exposed to the
foundations toward the street. Its con-
struction, over a century and a half ago,
had followed the grading and straighten-

THE SHUNNED HOUSE

419

ing of the road in that especial vicinity;
for Benefit Street — at first called Back
Street — was laid out as a lane winding
amongst the graveyards of the first set-
tlers, and straightened only when the
removal of the bodies to the North Burial
Ground made it decently possible to cut
through the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain
some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn
from the roadway; but a widening of the
street at about the time of the Revolution
sheared off most of the intervening space,
exposing the foundations so that a brick

basement wall had to be made, giving
the deep cellar a street frontage with door
and one window above ground, close to
the new line of public travel. When
the sidewalk was laid out a century ago
the last of the intervening space was
removed; and Poe in his walks must
have seen only a sheer ascent of dull gray
brick flush with the sidewalk and sur- (
mounted at a height of ten feet by the
antique shingled bulk of the house
proper.

The farm-like ground extended back
very deeply up the hill, almost to

"That awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar.'

420

WEIRD TALES

Wheaton Street. The space south of the
house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of
course greatly above the existing side-
walk level, forming a terrace bounded by
a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone
pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps
which led inward between canyon-like
surfaces to the upper region of mangy
lawn, rheumy brick walks, and neglected
gardens whose dismantled cement urns,
rusted kettles fallen from tripods of
knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia
set off the weather-beaten front door with
its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters,
and wormy triangular pediment.

What I heard in my youth about
the shunned house was merely that
people died there in alarmingly great
numbers. That, I was told, was why the
original owners had moved out some
twenty years after building the place. It
was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because
of the dampness and fungous growths in
the cellar, the general sickish smell, the
drafts of the hallways, or the quality of
the well and pump water. These things
were bad enough, and these were all that
gained belief among the persons whom
I knew. Only the notebooks of my anti-
quarian uncle. Doctor Elihu Whipple, re-
vealed to me at length the darker, vaguer
surmises which formed an undercurrent
of folklore among old-time servants and
humble folk; surmises which never trav-
elled far, and which were largely for-
gotten when Providence grew to be a
metropolis with a shifting modern popu-
lation.

The general fact is, that the house was
never regarded by the solid part of the
community as in any real sense "haunted."
There were no widespread tales of rattling
chains, cold currents of air, extinguished
lights, or faces at the window. Extrem-
ists sometimes said the house was "un-
lucky," but that is as far as even they

went. What was really beyond dispute
is that a frightful proportion of persons
died there; or more accurately, had died
there, since after some peculiar happen-
ings over sixty years ago the building
had become deserted through the sheer
impossibility of renting it. These persons
were not all cut off suddenly by any one
cause; rather did it seem that their vitality
was insidiously sapped, so that each one
died the sooner from whatever tendency
to weakness he may have naturally had.
And those who did not die displayed in
varying degree a type of anemia or con-
sumption, and sometimes a decline of the
mental faculties, whidi spoke ill for the
salubriousness of the building. Neigh-
boring houses, it must be added, seemed
entirely free from the noxious quality.

This much I knew before my insistent
questioning led my uncle to show me the
notes which finally embarked us both on
our hideous investigation. In my child-
hood the shunned house was vacant, with
barren, gnarled and terrible old trees,
long, queerly pale grass and nightmar-
ishiy misshapen weeds in the high terraced
yard where birds never lingered. We
boys used to overrun the place, and I can
still recall my youthful terror not only at
the morbid strangeness of this sinister
vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere
and odor of the dilapidated house, whose
unlocked front door was often entered in
quest of shudders. The small-paned win-
dows were largely broken, and a name-
less air of desolation hung round the
precarious panelling, shaky interior shut-
ters, peeling wall-paper, falling plaster,
rickety staircases, and such fragments of
battered furniture as still remained. The
dust and cobwebs added their touch of
the fearful; and brave indeed was the
boy who would voluntarily ascend the
ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length
lighted only by small blinking windows
in the gable ends, and filled with a

THE SHUNNED HOUSE

421

massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and
spinning-wheels which infinite years of
deposit had shrouded and festooned into
monstrous and hellish shapes.

But after all, the attic was not the
most terrible part of the house. It was
the dank, humid cellar which somehow
exerted the strongest repulsion on us,
even though it was wholly above ground
on the street side, with only a thin door
and window-pierced brick wall to sep-
arate it from the busy sidewalk. We
scarcely knew whether to haunt it in
spectral fascination, or to shun it for
the sake of our souls and our sanity. For
one thing, the bad odor of the house
was strongest there; and for another
thing, we did not like the white fungous
growths which occasionally sprang up in
rainy summer weather from the hard
earth floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like
the vegetation in the yard outside, were
truly horrible in their outlines; detestable
parodies of toadstools and Indian-pipes,
whose like we had never seen in any other
situation. They rotted quickly, and at one
stage became slightly phosphorescent; so
that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke
of witch-fires glowing behind the broken
panes of the fetor-spreading windows.

We never — even in our wildest Hal-
loween moods — visited this cellar by
night, but in some of our daytime visits
could detect the phosphorescence, espe-
cially when the day was dark and wet.
There was also a subtler thing we often
thought we detected — a very strange
thing which was, however, merely sug-
gestive at most. I refer to a sort of
cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor —
a vague, shifting deposit of mold or niter
which wc sometimes thought we could
trace amidst the sparse fungous growths
near the huge fireplace of the basement
kitchen. Once in a while it struck us
that this patch bore an uncanny resem-
blance to a doubled-up human figure,

though generally no such kinship existed,
and often there was no whitish deposit
whatever.

On a certain rainy afternoon when this
illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and
when, in addition, I had fancied I
glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shim-
mering exhalation rising from the nit-
rous pattern toward the yawning fire-
place, I spoke to my uncle about the
matter. He smiled at this odd conceit,
but it seemed that his smile was tinged
with reminiscence. Later I heard that a
similar notion entered into some of the
wild ancient tales of the common folk
— a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish,
wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the
great chimney, and queer contours as-
sumed by certain of the sinuous tree-
roots that thrust their way into the cellar
through the loose foundation-stones.

2

NOT till my adult years did my uncle
set before me the notes and data
which he had collected concerning the
shunned house. Doctor Whipple was a
sane, conservative physician of the old
school, and for all his interest in the
place was not eager to encourage young
thoughts toward the abnormal. His own
view, postulating simply a building and
location of markedly unsanitary quali-
ties, had nothing to do with abnormality;
but he realized that the very picturesque-
ness which aroused his own interest would
in a boy's fanciful mind take on all man-
ner of gruesome imaginative associations.

The doctor was a bachelor; a white-
haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gen-
tleman, and a local historian of note, who
had often broken a lance with such con-
troversial guardians of tradition as Sidney
S. Rider and Thomas W. Bidcneli. He
lived with one man-servant in a Georgian
homestead with knocker and iron-railed ]

422

WEIRD TALES

steps, balanced eerily on the steep ascent
of North Court Street beside the ancient
brick court and colony house where his
grandfather — a cousin of that celebrated
privateersman, Captain Whipple, who
burnt His Majesty's armed schooner
Gas pee in 1772 — had voted in the legis-
lature on May 4, 1776, for the inde-
pendence of the Rhode Island Colony.
Around him in the damp, low-ceiled li-
brary with the musty white panelling,
heavy carved overmantel and small-paned,
vine-shaded windows, were the relics and
records of his ancient family, among
which were many dubious allusions to the
shunned house in Benefit Street. That
pest spot lies not far distant — for Ben-
efit runs ledgewise just above the court
house along the precipitous hill up which
the first settlement climbed.

When, in the end, my insistent pester-
ing and maturing years evoked from my
uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay
before me a strange enough chronicle.
Long-winded, statistical, and drearily
genealogical as some of the matter was,
there ran through it a continuous thread
of brooding, tenacious horror and pre-
ternatural malevolence which impressed
me even more than it had impressed the
good doctor. Separate events fitted to-
gether uncannily, and seemingly irrel-
evant details held mines of hideous possi-
bilities. A new and burning curiosity
grew in me, compared to which my boy-
ish curiosity was feeble and inchoate.

The first revelation led to an exhaustive
research, and finally to that shuddering
quest which proved so disastrous to my-
self and mine. For at the last my uncle
insisted on joining the search I had
commenced, and after a certain night in
that house he did not come away with
me. I am lonely without that gentle soul
whose long years were filled only with
honor, virtue, good taste, benevolence,
and learning. I have reared a marble urn

to his memory in St. John's churchyard —
the place that Poe loved — the hidden
grove of giant willows on the hill, where
tombs and headstones huddle quietly be-
tween the hoary bulk of the church and
the houses and bank walls of Benefit
Street.

The history of the house, opening
amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace
of the sinister either about its construction
or about the prosperous and honorable
family who built it. Yet from the first
a taint of calamity, soon increased to
boding significance, was apparent. My
uncle's carefully compiled record began
with the building of the structure in
1763, and followed the theme with an
unusual amount of detail. The shunned
house, it seems, was first inhabited by
William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dex-
ter, with their children, Elkanah, born
in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William,
Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born in
1761. Harris was a substantial merchant
and seaman in the West India trade, con-
nected with the firm of Obadiah Brown
and his nephews. After Brown's death
in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown
& Company made him master of the brig
Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons,
thus enabling him to erect the new home-
stead he had desired ever since his mar-
riage.

The site he had chosen — a recently
straightened part of the new and fashion-
able Back Street, which ran along the
side of the hill above crowded Cheap-
side — was all that could be wished, and
the building did justice to the location.
It was the best that moderate means
could afford, and Harris hastened to
move in before the birth of a fifth child
which the family expected. That child,
a boy, came in December; but was still-
born. Nor was any child to be born alive
in that house for a century and a half.

The next April, sickness occurred

THE SHUNNED HOUSE

among the children, and Abigail and
Ruth died before the month was over.
Doctor Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as
some infantile fever, though others de-
clared it was more of a mere wasting-
away or decline. It seemed, in any event,
to be contagious; for Hannah Bo wen, one
of the two servants, died of it in the fol-
lowing June. Eli Lideason, the other serv-
ant, constantly complained of weakness;
and would have returned to his father's
farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden at-
tachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was
hired to succeed Hannah. He died the
next year — a sad year indeed, since it
marked the death of William Harris him-
self, enfeebled as lie was by the climate
of Martinique, where his occupation had
kept him for considerable periods during
the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never re-
covered from the shock of her husband's
death, and the passing of her first-born
Elkanali two years later was the final
blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell vic-
tim to a mild form of insanity, and was
thereafter confined to the upper part of
the house; her elder maiden sister, Mercy
Dexter, having moved in to take charge
of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-
boned woman of great strength; but her
health visibly declined from the time of
her advent. She was greatly devoted to
her unfortunate sister, and had an especial
affection for her only surviving nephew
William, who from a sturdy infant had
become a sickly, spindling lad. In this
year the servant Mehitabel died, and the
other servant, Preserved Smith, left with-
out coherent explanation — or at least,
with only some wild tales and a com-
plaint that he disliked the smell of the
place. For a time Mercy could secure no
more help, since the seven deaths and
case of madness, all occurring within five
years' space, had begun to set in motion
the body of fireside rumor which later be-

came so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she
obtained new servants from out of town;
Ann White, a morose woman from that
part of North Kingstown now set off as
the township of Exeter, arid a capable
Boston man named Zenas Low.

IT was Ann White who first gave def-
inite shape to the sinister idle talk.
Mercy should have known better than to
hire anyone from the Nooscneck Hill
country, for that remote bit of backwoods
was then, as now, a seat of die most un-
comfortable superstitions. As lately as '
1892 an Exeter community exhumed a
dead body and ceremoniously burnt its
heart in order to prevent certain alleged
visitations injurious to the public health
and peace, and one may imagine the
point of view of die same section in
1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously ac-
tive, and within a few months Mercy
discharged her, filling her place with a
faithful and amiable Amazon from New-
port, Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her
madness, gave voice to dreams and
imaginings of the most hideous sort. At
times her screams became insupportable,
and for long periods she would utter
shrieking horrors which necessitated her
son's temporary residence with his cousin,
Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near
the new college building. The boy would
seem to improve after these visits, and had
Mercy been as wise as she was well-mean-
ing, she would have let him live perma-
nently with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris
cried out in her fits of violence, tradition
hesitates to say; or rather, presents such
extravagant accounts that they nullify
themselves through sheer absurdity. Cer-
tainly it sounds absurd to hear that a
woman educated only in the rudiments
of French often shouted for hours in a
coarse and idiomatic form of diat lan-
guage, or that the same person, alone and ,

424

WEIRD TALES

guarded, complained wildly of a staring
thing which bit and chewed at her. In
1772 the servant Zenas died, and when
Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with
a shocking delight utterly foreign to her.
The next year she herself died, and was
laid to rest in the North Burial Ground
beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with
Great Britain in 177'). William Harris,
despite his scant sixteen years and feeble
constitution, managed to enlist in the
Army of Observation under General
Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a
steady rise in health and prestige. In
1780, as a captain in the Rhode Island
forces in New Jersey under Colonel
Angell, he met and married Phebe Het-
field of Elizabethtown, whom he brought
to Providence upon his honorable dis-
charge in the following year.

The young soldier's return was not a
thing of unmitigated happiness. The
house, it is true, was still in good condi-
tion; and the street had been widened
and changed in name from Back Street
to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter' s
once robust frame had undergone a sad
and curious decay, so that she was now a
stooped and pathetic figure with hollow
voice and disconcerting pallor — qualities
shared to a singular degree by the one
remaining servant Maria. In the autumn
of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a
still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth
of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave
of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly con-
vinced of the radically unhealthful nature
of his abode, now took steps toward
quitting it and closing it for ever. Secur-
ing temporary quarters for himself and
his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball
Inn, he arranged for the building of a
new and finer house in Westminster
Street, in the growing part of the town
across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785,

his son Dutee was born; and there the
family dwelt till the encroachments of
commerce drove them back across the
river and over the hill to Angell Street,
in the newer East Side residence district,
where the late Archer Harris built his
sumptuous but hideous French-roofed
mansion in 1876. William and Phebe
both succumbed to the yellow fever epi-
demic of 1797, but Dutee was brought up
by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's
son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and
rented the Benefit Street house despite
William's wish to keep it vacant. He
considered it an obligation to his ward to
make the most of all the boy's property,
nor did he concern himself with the
deaths and illnesses which caused so
many changes of tenants, or the steadily
growing aversion with which the house
was generally regarded. It is likely that he
felt only vexation when, in 1804, the
town council ordered him to fumigate the
place with sulfur, tar, and gum camphor
on account of the much- discussed deaths
of four persons, presumably caused by
the then diminishing fever epidemic.
They said the place had a febrile smell.

Dutee himself thought little of the
house, for he grew up to be a privateers-
man, and served with distinction on the
Vigilant under Captain Cahoone in the
War of 1812. He returned unharmed,
married in 1814, and became a father on
that memorable night of September 23,
1815, when a great gale drove the waters
of the bay over half the town, and floated
a tall sloop well up Westminster Street
so that its masts almost tapped the Harris
windows in symbolic affirmation that the
new boy, Welcome, was a seaman's son.

Welcome did not survive his father,
but lived to perish gloriously at Fred-
ericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his
son Archer knew of the shunned house
as other than a nuisance almost impos-

sible to rent — perhaps on account of the
mustincss and sickly odor of unkempt
old age. Indeed, it never was rented after
a series of deaths culminating in 1861,
•which the excitement of the war tended
to throw into obscurity. Carrington Har-
ris, last of the male line, knew it only as
a deserted and somewhat picturesque
center of legend until I told him my ex-
perience. He had meant to tear it down
and build an apartment house on the site,
but after my account decided to let it
stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor
has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining
tenants. The horror has gone.

3

IT may well be imagined how power-
fully I was affected by the annals of
the Harrises. In this continuous record
there seemed to me to brood a persistent
evil beyond anything in nature as I had
known it; an evil clearly connected with
the house and not with the family. This
impression was confirmed by my uncle's
less systematic array of miscellaneous data
— legends transcribed from sen' ant gos-
sip, cuttings from the papers, copies of
death certificates by fellow-physicians,
and the like. All of this material I cannot
hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless
antiquarian and very deeply interested in
the shunned house; but I may refer to
several dominant points which earn notice
by their recurrence through many reports
from diverse sources. For example, the
servant gossip was practically unanimous
in attributing to the fungous and mal-
odorous cellar of the house a vast su-
premacy in evil influence. There had been
servants — Ann White especially — who
would not use the cellar kitchen, and at
least three well-defined legends bore
upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic
outlines assumed by tree-roots and
patches of mold in that region. These

latter narratives interested me profoundly,
on account of what I had seen in my boy-
hood, but I felt that most of the signifi-
cance had in each case been largely ob-
scured by additions from the common
stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter supersti-
tion, had promulgated the most extrava-
gant and at the same time most consistent
tale; alleging that there must lie buried
beneath the house one of those vampires
— the dead who retain their bodily form
and live on the blood or breath of the
living — whose hideous legions send their
preying shapes or spirits abroad by night.
To destroy a vampire one must, the
grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its
heart, or at least drive a stake through
that organ; and Ann's dogged insistence
on a search under the cellar had been
prominent in bringing about her dis-
charge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide
audience, and were the more readily ac-
cepted because the house indeed stood on
land once used for burial purposes. To
me their interest depended less on this
circumstance than on the peculiarly ap-
propriate way in which they dovetailed
with certain other things — the complaint
of the departing servant Preserved Smith,
who had preceded Ann and never heard
of her, that something "sucked his
breath" at night; the death-certificates of
the fever victims of 1804, issued by
Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showing the
four deceased persons all unaccountably
lacking in blood; and the obscure pas-
sages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings,
where she complained of the sharp teeth
of a glassy-eyed, half -visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstitition
though I am, these things produced in
me an odd sensation, which was intensi-
fied by a pair of widely separated news-
paper cuttings relating to deaths in the
shunned house — one from the Providence

426

WEIRD TALES

Gazette and Country-Journal of April
12, 1815, and the other from the Daily
Transcript and Chronicle of October 27,
1845 — each of which detailed an ap-
pallingly grisly circumstance whose dupli-
cation was remarkable. It seems that in
both instances the dying person, in 1815
a gentle old lady named Stafford and in
1845 a schoolteacher of middle age
named Eleazar Durfec, became trans-
figured in a horrible way, glaring glassily
and attempting to bite the throat of the
attending physician. Even more puzzling,
though, was the final case which put an
end to the renting of the house — a series
of anemia deaths preceded by progressive
madnesses wherein the patient would
craftily attempt the lives of his relatives
by incisions in the neck or wrist.

This was in I860 and 1861, when my
uncle had just begun his medical prac-
tise; and before leaving for the front he
heard much of it from his elder profes-
sional colleagues. The really inexplicable
thing was the way in which the victims —
ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and
widely shunned house could now be
rented to no others — would babble
maledictions in French, a language they
could not possibly have studied to any
extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby
Harris nearly a century before, and so
moved my uncle that he commenced col-
lecting historical data on the house after
listening, some time subsequent to his
return from the war, to the first-hand ac-
count of Doctors Chase and Whitmarsh.
Indeed, I could see that my uncle had
thought deeply on the subject, and that
he was glad of my own interest — an
open-minded and sympathetic interest
which enabled him to discuss with me
matters at which others would merely
have laughed. His fancy had not gone so
far as mine, but he felt that the place was
rare in its imaginative potentialities, and

worthy of note as an inspiration in the
field of the grotesque and macabre.

For my part, I was disposed to take the
whole subject with profound seriousness,
and began at once not only to review the
evidence, but to accumulate as much
more as I could. I talked with the elderly
Archer Harris, then owner of the house,
many times before his death in 1916; and
obtained from him and his still surviving
maiden sister Alice an authentic corro-
boration of all the family data my uncle
had collected. When, however, I asked
them what connection with France or its
language the house could have, they con-
fessed themselves as frankly baffled and
ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and
all that Miss Harris could say was that
an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee
Harris, had heard of might have shed a
little light. The old seaman, who had
survived his son Welcome's death in bat-
tle by two years, had not himself known
the legend, but recalled that his earliest
nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed
darkly aware of something that might
have lent a weird significance to the
French raving of Rhoby Harris, which
she had so often heard during the last
days of that hapless woman. Maria had
been at the shunned house from 1769 till
the removal of the family in 1783, and
had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she
hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat
peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last
moments, but he had soon forgotten all
about it save that it was something pe-
culiar. The granddaughter, moreover, re-
called even this much with difficulty. She
and her brother were not so much in-
terested in the house as was Archer's
son Carrington, the present owner, with
whom I talked after my experience.

Having exhausted the Harris family
of all the information it could fur-
nish, I turned my attention to early town

records and deeds with a zeal more pene-
trating than that which my uncle had oc-
casionally shown in the same work. What
I wished was a comprehensive history of
the site from its very settlement in 1636
— or even before, if any Narragansett
Indian legend could be unearthed to sup-
ply the data. I found, at the start, that
the land had been part of the long strip
of home lot granted originally to John
Throckmorton; one of many similar strips
beginning at the Town Street beside the
river and extending up over the hill to a
line roughly corresponding with the
modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton
lot had later, of course, been much sub-
divided; and I became very assiduous in
tracing that section through which Back
or Benefit Street was later run. It had, as
rumor indeed said, been the Throck-
morton graveyard; but as I examined the
records more carefully, I found that the
graves had all been transferred at an
early date to the North Burial Ground on
the Pawtucket West Road.

Then suddenly I came — by a rare piece
of chance, since it was not in the main
body of records and might easily have
been missed — upon something which
aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in
as it did with several of the queerest
phases of the affair. It was the record of
a lease, in 1697, of a small tract of
ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife.
At last the French element had appeared
— that, and another deeper element of
horror which the name conjured up from
the darkest recesses of my weird and
heterogeneous reading — and I feverishly
studied the platting of the locality as it
had been before the cutting through and
partial straightening of Back Street be-
tween 1747 and 1758. I found what I
had half expected, that where the
shunned house now stood the Roulets had
laid out their graveyard behind a one-
- story and attic cottage, and that no record

of any transfer of graves existed. The
document, indeed, ended in much con-
fusion; and I was forced to ransack both
the Rhode Island Historical Society and
Shepley Library before 1 could find a
local door which the name of Etienne
Roulet would unlock. In the end I did
find something; something of such vague
but monstrous import that I set about at
once to examine the cellar of the shunned
house itself with a new and excited
minuteness.

The Roulets, it seemed, had come in
1696 from East Greenwich, down the
west shore of Narragansett Bay. They
were Huguenots from Canude, and had
encountered much opposition before die
Providence selectmen allowed them to
settle in the town. Unpopularity had
dogged them in East Greenwich, whither
they had come in 1686, after the revoca-
tion of the Edict of Nantes, and rumor
said that the cause of dislike extended
beyond mere racial and national
prejudice, or the land disputes which in-
volved other French settlers with the
English in rivalries which not even Gov-
ernor Andros could quell. But their
ardent Protestantism — too ardent, some
whispered — and their evident distress
when virtually driven from the village
down the bay, had moved the sympathy
of the town fathers. Here the strangers
had been granted a haven; and the
swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agri-
culture than at reading queer books and
drawing queer diagrams, was given a
clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon
Tillinghast's wharf, far south in Town
Street. There had, however, been a riot
of some sort later on — perhaps forty
years later, after old Roulet's death —
and no one seemed to hear of the family
after that.

For a century and more, it appeared,
the Roulets had been well remembered
and frequently discussed as vivid ind-

428

WEIRD TALES

dents in the quiet life of a New England
seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fel-
low whose erratic conduct had probably
provoked the riot which wiped out the
family, was particularly a source of specu-
lation; and though Providence never
shared the witchcraft panics of her Puri-
tan neighbors, it was freely intimated by
old wives that his prayers were neither
uttered at the proper time nor directed
toward the proper object. All this had
undoubtedly formed the basis of the leg-
end known by old Maria Robbins. What
relation it had to the French ravings of
Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of
the shunned house, imagination or fu-
ture discover}' alone could determine. I
wondered how many of those who had
known the legends realized that addi-
tional link with the terrible which my
wider reading had given me; that om-
inous item in the annals of morbid horror
whiich tells of the creature Jacques
Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was con-
demned to death as a demoniac but after-
ward saved from the stake by the Paris
parliament and shut in a madhouse. He
had been found covered with blood and
shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after
the killing and rending of a boy by a
pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to
lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearth-
side tale, with a queer significance as to
name and place; but I decided that the
Providence gossips could not have gener-
ally known of it. Had they known, the
coincidence of names would have brought
some drastic and frightened action — in-
deed, might not its limited whispering
have precipitated the final riot which
erased the Roulets from the town?

Inow visited the accursed place with
increased frequency; studying the un-
wholesome vegetation of the garden, ex-
amining all the walls of the building,
and poring over every inch of the

earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Car-
rington Harris's permission, I fitted a
key to the disused door opening from the
cellar directly upon Benefit Street, pre-
ferring to have a more immediate 'access
to the outside world than the dark stairs,
ground-floor hall, and front door could
give. There, where morbidity lurked most
thickly, I searched and poked during
long afternoons when the sunlight filtered
in through the cobwebbed above-ground
windows, and a sense of security glowed
from the unlocked door which placed
me only a few feet from the placid side-
walk outside. Nothing new rewarded my
efforts — only the same depressing musti-
ness and faint suggestions of noxious
odors and nitrous outlines on the floor —
and I fancy that many pedestrians must
have watched me curiously through the
broken panes.

At length, upon a suggestion of my
uncle's, I decided to try the spot noctur-
nally; and one stormy midnight ran the
beams of an electric tordi over the moldy
floor with its uncanny shapes and dis-
torted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The
place had dispirited me curiously that
evening, and I was almost prepared when
I saw — or thought I saw — amidst the
whitish deposits a particularly sharp defi-
nition of the "huddled form" I had sus-
pected from boyhood. Its clearness was
astonishing and unprecedented — and as I
watched I seemed to see again the thin,
yellowish, shimmering exhalation which
had startled me on that rainy afternoon
so many years before.

Above the anthropomorphic patch of
mold by the fireplace it rose; a subtle,
sickish, almost luminous vapor which as
it hung trembling in the dampness
seemed to develop vague and shocking
suggestions of form, gradually trailing off
into nebulous decay and passing up into
the blackness of the great chimney with
a fetor in its wake. It was truly horrible,

and the more so to me because of what I
knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I
watched it fade — and as I watched I felt
that it was in turn watching me greedily
with eyes more imaginable than visible.
When I told my uncle about it he was
greatly aroused; and after a tense hour
of reflection, arrived at a definite and
drastic decision. Weighing in his mind
the importance of the matter, and the
significance of our relation to it, he in-
sisted that we both test — and if possible
destroy — the horror of the house by a
joint night or nights of aggressive vigil
in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.

4

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919,
after a proper notification of Car-
rington Harris which did not include
surmises as to what we expected to find,
my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned
house two camp chairs and a folding
camp cot, together with some scientific
mechanism of greater weight and intri-
cacy. These we placed in the cellar dur-
ing the day, screening the windows with
paper and planning to return in the eve-
ning for our first vigil. We had locked
the door from the cellar to the ground
floor; and having a key to the outside
cellar door, were prepared to leave our
expensive and delicate apparatus — which
we had obtained secretly and at great
cost — as many days as our vigils might
be protracted. It was our design to sit
up together till very late, and then watch
singly till dawn in two-hour stretches,
myself first and then my companion; the
inactive member resting on the cot.

The natural leadership with which my
uncle procured the instruments from the
laboratories of Brown University and the
Cranston Street Armory, and instinctively
assumed direction of our venture, was a
marvelous commentary on the potential

vitality and resilience of a man of eighty-
one. Elihu Whipple had lived according
to the hygienic laws he had preached as
a physician, and but for what happened
later would be here in full vigor today.
Only two persons suspected what did
happen — Carrington Harris and myself.
I had to tell Harris because he owned
the house and deserved to know what
had gone out of it. Then too, we had
spoken to iiim in advance of our quest;
and I felt after my uncle* s going that he
would understand and assist me in some
vitally necessary public explanations. He
turned very pale, but agreed to help me,
and decided that it would now be safe
to rent the house.

To declare that we were not nervous
on that rainy night of watdiing would be
an exaggeration both gross and ridicu-
lous. We were not, as I have said, in
any sense childishly superstitious, but sci-
entific study and reflection had taught us
that the known universe of three dimen-
sions embraces the merest fraction of the
whole cosmos of substance and energy. In
this case an overwhelming preponderance
of evidence from numerous authentic
sources pointed to the tenacious existence"
of certain forces of great power and, so
far as the human point of view is con-
cerned, exceptional malignancy. To say
that we actually believed in vampires or
werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive
statement. Rather must it be said that
we were not prepared to deny the possi-
bility of certain unfamiliar and unclassi-
fied modifications of vital force and at-
tenuated matter; existing very infrequent-
ly in three-dimensional space because of
its more intimate connection with other
spatial units, yet close enough to the
boundary of our own to furnish us oc-
casional manifestations which we, for
lack of a proper vantage-point, may never
hope to understand.

In short, it seemed to my uncle and

430

WEIRD TALES

me that an incontrovertible array of facts
pointed to some lingering influence in the
shunned house; traceable to one or an-
other of the ill-favored French settlers of
two centuries before, and still operative
through rare and unknown laws of
atomic and electronic motion. That the
family of Roulet had possessed an ab-
normal affinity for outer circles of entity
— dark spheres which for normal folk
hold only repulsion and terror — their re-
corded history seemed to prove. Had not,
then, the riots of those bygone seventeen-
thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns
in the morbid brain of one or more of
them — notably the sinister Paul Roulet —
which obscurely survived the bodies mur-
dered and buried by the mob, and con-
tinued to function in some multiple-
dimensioned space along the original
lines of force determined by a frantic
hatred of the encroaching community?

Such a thing was surely not a physical
or biochemical impossibility in the light
of a newer science which includes the
theories of relativity and intra-atomic
action. One might easily imagine an alien
nucleus of substance or energy, formless
or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible
or immaterial subtractions from the life-
force or bodily tissue and fluids of other
and more palpably living things into
which it penetrates and with whose fabric
it sometimes completely merges itself. It
might be actively hostile, or it might be
dictated merely by blind motives of self-
preservation. In any case such a monster
must of necessity be in our scheme of
things an anomaly and an intruder,
whose extirpation forms a primary duty
with every man not an enemy to the
world's life, health, and sanity.

What baffled us was our utter igno-
rance of the aspect in which we might en-
counter the thing. No sane person had
ever seen it, and few had ever felt it
definitely. It might be pure energy — a

form ethereal and outside the realm of
substance — or it might be partly material;
some unknown and equivocal mass of
plasticity, capable of changing at will to
nebulous approximations of the solid,
liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled
states. The anthropomorphic patch of
mold on the floor, the form of the yel-
lowish vapor, and the curvature of the
tree-roots in some of the old tales, all
argued at least a remote and reminiscent
connection with the human shape; but
how representative or permanent that
similarity might be, none could say with
any kind of certainty.

WE had devised two weapons to
fight it; a large and specially fitted
Crookes tube operated by powerful stor-
age batteries and provided with peculiar
screens and reflectors, in case it proved
intangible and opposable only by vigor-
ously destructive ether radiations, and a
pair of military flame-throwers of the sort
used in the World War, in case it proved
partly material and susceptible of me-
chanical destruction — for like the super-
stitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared
to burn the thing's heart out if heart
existed to burn. All this aggressive mech-
anism we set in the cellar in positions
carefully arranged with reference to the
cot and chairs, and to the spot before the
fireplace where the mold had taken
strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by
the way. was only faintly visible when we
placed our furniture and instruments, and
when we returned that evening for the
actual vigil. For a moment I half doubted
that I had ever seen it in the more defi-
nitely limned form — but then I thought
of the legends.

Our cellar vigil began at ten p. m.,
daylight saving time, and as it continued
we found no promise of pertinent devel-
opments. A weak, filtered glow from the
rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a

THE SHUNNED HOUSE

feeble phosphorescence from the detest-
able fungi within, showed the dripping
stone of the walls, from which all traces
of whitewash had vanished; the dank,
fetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor
with its obscene fungi; the rotting re-
mains of what had been stools, chairs, and
tables, and other more shapeless furni-
ture; the heavy planks and massive beams
of the ground floor overhead; the de-
crepit plank door leading to bins and
chambers beneath other parts of the
house; the crumbling stone staircase with
ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude
and cavernous fireplace of blackened
brick where rusted iron fragments re-
vealed the past"" presence of hooks, and-
irons, spit, crane, and a door to the
Dutch oven — these things, and our aus-
tere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy
and intricate destructive machinery we
had brought.

We had, as in my own former explor-
ations, left the door to the street un-
locked; so that a direct and practical path
of escape might lie open in case of
manifestations beyond our power to deal
with. It was our idea that our continued
nocturnal presence would call forth what-
ever malign entity lurked there; and that
being prepared, we could dispose of the
thing with one or the other of our pro-
vided means as soon as we had recognized
and observed it sufficiently. How long it
might require to evoke and extinguish
the thing, we had no notion. It oc-
curred to us, too, that our venture was
far from safe; for in what strength die
thing might appear no one could tell.
But we deemed the game worth the
hazard, and embarked on it alone and
unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking
of outside aid would only expose us to
ridicule and perhaps defeat our entire
purpose. Such was our frame of mind as
we talked — far into the night, till my
uncle's growing drowsiness made me re-

mind him to lie down for his two-hour
sleep.

Something like fear chilled me as I
sat there in the small hours alone — I say
alone, for one who sits by a' sleeper is
indeed alone; perhaps more alone than
he can realize. My uncle breathed heav-
ily, his deep inhalations and exhalations
accompanied by the rain outside, and
punctuated by another nerve - racking
sound of distant dripping water within —
for the house was repulsively damp even
in dry weather, and in this storm posi-
tively swamp-like. I studied the loose,
antique masonry of the walls in the
fungus-light and the feeble rays which
stole in from the street through the
screened window; and once, when the
noisome atmosphere of the place seemed
about to sicken me, I opened the door
and looked up and down die street,
feasting my eyes on familiar sights and
my nostrils on wholesome air. Still noth-
ing occurred to reward my watching; and
I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the
better of apprehension.

Then the stirring of my uncle in his
sleep attracted my notice. He had turned
restlessly on the cot several times during
the latter half of the first hour, but now
he was breathing with unusual irregu-
larity, occasionally heaving a sigh which
held more than a few of the qualities of
a choking moan.

I turned my electric flashlight on him
and found his face averted; so rising and
crossing to the other side of the cot, I
again flashed the light to see if he seemed
in any pain. What I saw unnerved me
most surprizing ly, considering its relative
triviality. It must have been merely the
association of any odd circumstance with
the sinister nature of our location and
mission, for surely the circumstance was
not in itself frightful or unnatural. It
was merely that my uncle's facial expres-
sion, disturbed no doubt by the strange

432

WEIRD TALES

dreams which our situation prompted,
betrayed considerable agitation, and
seemed not at all characteristic of him.
His habitual expression was one of kindly
and well-bred calm, whereas now a vari-
ety of emotions seemed struggling within
him. I think, on the whole, that it was
this variety which chiefly disturbed me.
My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in
increasing perturbation and with eyes that
had now started open, seemed not one
but many men, and suggested a curious
quality of alienage from himself.

All at once he commenced to mutter,
and I did not like the look of his
mouth and teeth as he spoke. The words
were at first indistinguishable, and then
— with a tremendous start — I recognized
something about them which filled me
with icy fear till I recalled the breadth
of my uncle's education and the inter-
minable translations he had made from
anthropological and antiquarian articles in
the Revue des Deux Mondes. For the
venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering
in French, and the few phrases I could
distinguish seemed connected with the
darkest myths he had ever adapted from
the famous Paris magazine.

Suddenly a perspiration broke out on
the sleeper's forehead, and he leaped
abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of
French changed to a cry in English, and
the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, "My
breath, my breath!" Then the awakening
became complete, and with a subsidence
of facial expression to the normal state
my uncle seized my hand and began to
relate a dream whose nucleus of signifi-
cance I could only surmise with a kind
of awe.

He had, he said, floated off from a very
ordinary series of dream-pictures into a
scene whose strangeness was related to
nothing he had ever read. It was of this
world, and yet not of it — a shadowy

geometrical confusion in which could be
seen elements of familiar things in most
unfamiliar and perturbing combinations.
There was a suggestion of queerly dis-
ordered pictures superimposed one upon
another; an arrangement in which the
essentials of time as well as of space
seemed dissolved and mixed in the most
illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic
vortex of phantasmal images were occa-
sional snap-shots, if one might use the
term, of singular clearness but unaccount-
able heterogeneity.

Once my uncle thought he lay in a
carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of
angry faces framed by straggling locks
and three-cornered hats frowning down
on him. Again he seemed to be in the
interior of a house — an old house, appar-
ently — but the details and inhabitants
were constantly changing, and he could
never be certain of the faces or the furni-
ture, or even of the room itself, since
doors and windows seemed in just as
great a state of flux as the presumably
more mobile objects. It was queer —
damnably queer — and my uncle spoke
almost sheepishly, as if half expecting
not to be believed, when he declared
that of the strange faces many had un-
mistakably borne the features of the
Harris family. And all the while there
was a personal sensation of choking, as
if some pervasive presence had spread
itself through his body and sought to
possess itself of his vital processes.

I shuddered at the thought of those
vital processes, worn as they were by
eighty-one years of continuous function-
ing, in conflict with unknown forces of
which the youngest and strongest system
might well be afraid; but in another
moment reflected that dreams are only
dreams, and that these uncomfortable
visions could be, at most, no more than
my uncle's reaction to the investigations

W. T. — 3

1

THE SHUNNED HOUSE

and expectations which had lately filled
our minds to the exclusion of all else.

Conversation, also, soon tended to dis-
pel my sense of strangeness; and in time
I yielded to my yawns and took my turn
at slumber. My uncle seemed now very
wakeful, and welcomed his period of
watching even though the nightmare had
aroused him far ahead of his alotted two
hours.

Sleep sei2ed me quickly, and I was at
once haunted with dreams of the most
disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a
cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hos-
tility surging from all sides upon some
prison where I lay confined. I seemed
bound and gagged, and taunted by the
echoing yells of distant multitudes who
thirsted for my blood. My uncle's face
came to me with less pleasant association
than in waking hours, and I recall many
futile struggles and attempts to scream.
It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a
second I was not sorry for the echoing
shriek which clove through the barriers
of dream and flung me to a sharp and
startled awakeness in whidi every actual
object before my eyes stood out with
more than natural clearness and reality.

5

I had been lying with my face away
from my uncle's chair, so that in this
sudden flash of awakening I saw
only the door to the street, the win-
dow, and the wall and floor and ceil-
ing toward the north of the room, all
photographed with morbid vividness on
my brain in a light brighter than the
glow of the fungi or the rays from the
street outside. It was not a strong or
even a fairly strong light; certainly not
nearly strong enough to read an average
book by. But it cast a shadow of myself
and the cot on the floor, and had a
yellowish, penetrating force that hinted
. W. T. — 4

433

at things more potent than luminosity.
This I perceived with unhealthy sharp-
ness despite the fact that two of my other
senses were violently assailed. For on my
ears rang the reverberations of that
shocking scream, while my nostrils re-
volted at the stench which filled the
place. My mind, as alert as my senses,
recognized the gravely unusual; and al-
most automatically I leaped up and turned
about to grasp the destructive instru-
ments which we had left trained on the
moldy spot before the fireplace. As I
turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for
the scream had been in my uncle's voice,
and I knew not against what menace I
should have to defend him and myself.

Yet after all, the sight was worse than
I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond
horrors, and this was one of those nuclei
of all dreamable hideousness which the
cosmos saves to blast an accursed and un-
happy few. Out of the fungus-ridden
earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light,
yellow and diseased, which bubbled and
lapped to a gigantic height in vague out-
lines half human and half monstrous,
through which I could see the chimney
and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes —
wolfish and mocking — and the rugose
inscct-likc head dissolved at the top to a
thin stream of mist which curled putridly
about and finally vanished up the chim-
ney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is
only in conscious retrospection that I ever
definitely traced its damnable approach to
form. At the time, it was to me only a
seething, dimly phosphorescent cloud of
fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and
dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the
one object on which all my attention was
focussed. That object was my uncle —
the venerable Elihu Whipple — who with
blackening and decaying features leered
and gibbered at me, and reached out
dripping claws to rend me in the fury
which this horror had brought.

434

WEIRD TALES

It was a sense of routine which kept
me from going mad. I had drilled my-
self in preparation for the crucial mo-
ment, and blind training saved me. Rec-
ognizing the bubbling evil as no sub-
stance reachable by matter or material
chemistry, and therefore ignoring the
flame-thrower which loomed on my left,
I threw on the current of the Crookes
tube apparatus, and focussed toward that
scene of immortal blasphemousness the
strongest ether radiations which man's
art can arouse from the spaces and fluids
of nature. There was a bluish haze and
a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish
phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes.
But I saw the dimness was only that of
contrast, and that the waves from the
machine had no effect whatever.

Then, in the midst of that demoniac
spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which
brought cries to my lips and sent me
fumbling and staggering toward that un-
locked door to the quiet street, careless
of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon
the world, or what thoughts or judg-
ments of men I brought down upon my
head. In that dim blend of blue and
yellow the form of my uncle had com-
menced a nauseous liquefaction whose
essence eludes all description, and in
which there played across his vanishing
face such changes of identity as only
madness can conceive. He was at once
a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house
and a pageant. Lit by the mixed and un-
certain beams, that gelatinous face as-
sumed a dozen — a score — a hundred —
aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground
on a body that melted like tallow, in the
caricatured likeness of legions strange
and yet not strange.

I saw* the features of the Harris line,
masculine and feminine, adult and infan-
tile, and other features old and young,
coarse and refined, familiar and unfa-
miliar. For a second there flashed a

degraded counterfeit of a miniature of
poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen
in the School of Design museum, and
another time I thought I caught the raw-
boned image of Mercy Dexter as I re-
called her from a painting in Carring-
ton Harris's house. It was frightful be-
yond conception; toward the last, when
a curious blend of servant and baby
visages flickered close to the fungous floor
where a pool of greenish grease was
spreading, it seemed as though the shift-
ing features fought against themselves
and strove to form contours like those •
of my uncle's kindly face. I like to think
that he existed at that moment, and that
he tried to bid me farewell. It seems to
me I hiccupped a farewell from my own
parched throat as I lurched out into the
street; a thin stream of grease following
me through the door to the rain-
drenched sidewalk.

The rest is shadowy and monstrous.
There was no one in the soaking
street, and in all the world there was no
one 1 dared tell. I walked aimlessly south
past College Hill and the Athenaeum,
down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge
to the business section where tall build-
ings seemed to guard me as modern
material things guard the world from
ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then
gray dawn unfolded wetly from the east,
silhouetting the archaic hill and its vener-
able steeples, and beckoning me to the
place where my terrible work was still
unfinished. And in the end I went, wet,
hatless, and dazed in the morning light,
and entered that awful door in Benefit
Street which I had left ajar, and which
still swung cryptically in full sight of the
early householders to whom I dared not
speak.

The grease was gone, for the moldy
floor was porous. And in front of the
fireplace was no vestige of the giant dou-

THE SHUNNED HOUSE

435

bled-up form traced in niter. I looked
at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my
neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat
of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost,
and I could scarcely recall what was
dream and what was reality. Then
thought trickled back, and I knew that I
had witnessed things more horrible than
I had dreamed.

Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as
nearly as sanity would let me just what
had happened, and how I might end the
horror, if indeed it had been real. Matter
it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor any-
thing else conceivable by mortal mind.
What, then, but some exotic emanation;
some vampirish vapor such as Exeter
rustics tell of as lurking over certain
churchyards? This I felt was the clue,
and again I looked at the floor before
the fireplace where the mold and niter
had taken strange forms.

In ten minutes my mind was made up,
and taking my hat I set out for home,
where I bathed, ate, and gave by tele-
phone an order for a pickax, a spade, a
military gas-mask, and six carboys of
sulfuric acid, all to be delivered the next
morning at the cellar door of the shunned
house in Benefit Street. After that I tried
to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in
reading and in the composition of inane
verses to counteract my mood.

At eleven a. m. the next day I com-
menced digging. It was sunny weather,
and I was glad of that. I was still alone,
for as much as I feared the unknown
horror I sought, there was more fear in
the thought of telling anybody. Later I
told Harris only through sheer necessity,
and because he had heard odd tales from
old people which disposed him ever so
little toward belief. As I turned up the
stinking black earth in front of the fire-
place, my spade causing a viscous yellow
ichor to ooze from the white fungi which

it severed, I trembled at the dubious
thoughts of what I might uncover. Some
secrets of inner earth are not good for
mankind, and this seemed to me one of
them.

My hand shook perceptibly, but still I
delved; after a while standing in the
large hole I had made. With the deep-
ening of the hole, which was about six
feet square, the evil smell increased; and
I lost all doubt of my imminent contact
with the hellish thing whose emanations
had cursed the house for over a century
and a half. I wondered what it would
look like — what its form and substance
would be, and how big it might have
waxed through long ages of life-sucking.
At length I climbed out of the hole and
dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arrang-
ing the great carboys of acid around and
near two sides, so that when necessary
I might empty them all down the aperture
in quick succession. After that I dumped
earth only along the other two sides;
working more slowly and donning my
gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly
unnerved at my proximity to a nameless
thing at the bottom of a pit.

Suddenly my spade struck something
softer than earth. I shuddered, and made
a motion as if to climb out of the hole,
which was now as deep as my neck. Then
courage returned, and I scraped away
more dirt in the light of the electric
torch I had provided. The surface I un-
covered was fishy and glass}' — a kind of
semi-putrid congealed jelly with sugges-
tions of translucency. I scraped further,
and saw that it had form. There was a
rift where a part of the substance was
folded over. The exposed area was huge
and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth
soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two,
its largest part some two feet in diameter.
Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I

436

WEIRD TALES

leaped out of the hole and away from the
filthy thing; frantically unstopping and
tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitat-
ing their corrosive contents one after an-
other down that charnel gulf and upon
the unthinkable abnormality whose titan
elbow I had seen.

The blinding maelstrom of greenish-
yellow vapor which surged tempestu-
ously up from that hole as the floods of
acid descended, will never leave my
memory. All along the hill people tell of
the yellow day, when virulent and hor-
rible fumes arose from the factory waste
dumped in the Providence River, but I
know how mistaken they are as to the
source. They tell, too, of the hideous
roar which at the same time came from
some disordered water-pipe or gas main
underground — but again I could correct
them if I dared. It was unspeakably
shocking, and I do not see how I lived
through it. I did faint after emptying
the fourth carboy, which I had to handle
after the fumes had began to penetrate
my mask; but when I recovered I saw
that the hole was emitting no fresh
vapors.

The two remaining carboys I emptied
down without particular result, and after
a time I felt it safe to shovel the earth
back into the pit. It was twilight before
T was done, but fear had gone out of the
place. The dampness was less fetid, and
all the strange fungi had withered to a
kind of harmless grayish powder which
blew ash-like along the floor. One of
earth's nethermost terrors had perished
for ever; and if there be a hell, it had
received at last the demon soul of an
unhallowed thing. And as I patted down
the last spadeful of mold, I shed the
first of the many tears with which I have
paid unaffected tribute to my beloved
uncle's memory.

The next spring no more pale grass
and strange weeds came up in the shunned
house's terraced garden, and shortly after-
ward Carrington Harris rented the place.
It is still spectral, but its strangeness
fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with
my relief a queer regret when it is torn
down to make way for a tawdry shop or
vulgar apartment building. The barren
old trees in the yard have begun to bear
small, sweet apples, and last year the
birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

"Then I heard him in the hallway and
on the stairs."

omicidal Diary

By EARL PEIRCE, JR.

What strange compulsion drove an ordinarily gentle and cultured man, on one
night of each week, to roam the city streets and
commit a ghastly crime?

I AM writing this account of my
friend Jason Carse in the interests of
both justice and psychiatry, and per-
haps of demonology as well. There is no
greater proof of what I relate than the

shocked this city, the newspaper items re-
garding the crimes, and especially the
official report of the alienists who exam-
ined Carse during his trial. I cannot ex-
pect to bring Doctor Carse back to life,

sequence of murders which so recently for he was hanged until dead, but I do

437

438

WEIRD TALES

hope that this paper will offer new il-
lumination on cases of criminal decapi-
tation.

Justice and psychiatry are closely re-
lated, but it is difficult to recognize the
judicial importance of so outre a subject
as demonology. Yet I emphatically assert
that the case of Jason Carse is irrevocably
concerned with evil and dark lore sudi as
mankind has not known since the Holy
Inquisition.

One is naturally prejudiced against
Carse, for even I myself, his lifelong ac-
quaintance, was struck with repugnance
when I first realized the nature of his
activities, but his death on the gallows
should foreclose biased reflection and
permit the student to regard his case in a
purely empirical light. As I am the only
man in complete possession of the facts,
it behooves me to give this astounding
information to the world.

Jason Carse was a brilliant and respect-
ed criminologist, and at the time of his
arrest he was recognized as one of the
greatest students of the modern world, a
fact which has made his case one of un-
paralleled notoriety. I was his roommate
during the several years we spent in law
school, and, although he shot to the pin-
nacle of his branch of jurisprudence while
I was left to more prosaic routine, we
never lost the contact which has now be-
come so valuable. Our correspondence
was frequent and regular since we were
graduated, and I can say with justifiable
pride that Carse respected my friendship
as much as that of any other acquaint-
ance, if not more. It was this intimacy
with his personal life which has enabled
me, as friend and confidant, to witness
the revolting atavism which resulted in
such outrageous crimes.

I obtained my first hazy acquaintance
with the crimes three months ago when
I received Carse* s letter from Vienna. He

had just discovered sensational evidence
in a famous criminal case — one of recur-
rent human decapitation — and his conse-
quent enthusiasm was so rabid that I was
afraid the morbidity of such matters was
beginning to pervert his senses. For sev-
eral years I had become progressively
aware of Carse's melancholic attitude, and
I had often recommended that he take a
vacation from criminal cases. His indefat-
igable enthusiasm for research was all
against my advice, and he had gone re-
lentlessly ahead to the tragic climax
which my greatest fears could not have
imagined. This letter from Vienna, so
eager with indomitable /'/ jaut travailler,
confirmed my suspicion that Carse had
descended into the depressing rut of
monomania.

When he returned to America shortly
afterward I crossed the country to spend
a few days with him, but he was so sickly
and irritable that I could do nothing to
cheer his spirits. He continually brooded
over the case he had been investigating,
and I should have known at that time
there was a dangerous neurotic compul-
sion stirring in his subconscious mind.

Less than a week after my departure
from the city the first of the horrific head-
hunting crimes was committed and the
actual drama got under way. I can re-
call reading the sensational accounts in
the newspapers and my anxious fear that
this fresh display of criminal perversion
would excite Carse into a state nearing
hysteria. I telegraphed him that same
day, begging his refusal to bother with
the case and requesting that he come to
visit me. His reply was swift and brief;
he had already commenced his investi-
gations of the head-hunting crime and
nothing on earth could deter him from
his set course. Knowing him as I did, I
could do nothing but hope that the Head-
hunter would be swiftly captured and the
case brought to a finish. It was an un-

pleasant shock, therefore, when I read —
exactly one week later — that a second and
identical crime had been committed.

EVEN in my own city, three thousand
miles from the center of the crimes,
there was wild confusion at the announce-
ment of this second spectacular murder.
The reader may recall the international
effects of the infamous "Ripper" crimes
which terrified London a few decades
ago and he will understand how rapidly
the Head-hunter's fame spread through
crime-conscious America. Both murders
were made particularly mysterious be-
cause of the disappearance of the victims'
heads. I knew the damaging influence
which these doings would produce upon
Carse, for he had always been interested
in decapitations, and his thesis at the
University of Graz had been based upon
the mad career of Emil Drukker, the
Head-hunter of Cologne.

I wrote again to Carse and begged him
to abandon his studies in these new mur-
ders, but, as before, his response was cold
and discouraging. There was a wild and
almost fanatical tone in his letter which
was indicative of his obsessed mind, and
an ugly premonition occurred to me that
this would be the breaking-point of his
career.

The third and fourth murders, so hor-
ribly identical with the first two, came
about at weekly intervals, and the city
was in the grip of strangling terror.
There was no rime or reason for the
crimes, and yet the diabolical precision of
the murderer seemed to indicate he was a
madman of uncanny intelligence. In all
four cases his victims were vagabonds and
people of the lowest order. In none of
the murders had the victim been as-
saulted, but the head had disappeared,
seemingly for ever. There was not a
shred of evidence pointing to the solu-
tion, and, except that the police knew

him to be a homicidal maniac, there was
not a single person in a city of several
millions whom they could call the mur-
derer. Far worse than the four murders
committed was the belief that they would
continue week after week to an indeter-
minable conclusion.

I left for the city by plane on the eve-
ning of the discovery of the fifth victim,
and during the trans-country flight I read
Carse' s own statement in the Metropoli-
tan Gazette citing the crime as an atavis-
tic expression of animalism. The fact
that two of the five victims had been
men, according to Carse's theory, belied
the popular suspicion that the criminal
was a homicidal sadist. Carse expressed
the belief that the murderer was in the
grip of some inherent savagery, and that
the ghastly murders would continue until
he wore himself out by the sheer expen-
diture of energy.

I reached the city shortly after sun-
down, and at once I felt the awful tension
which had settled upon everyone in it.
Men and women moved furtively, air-
port officials and police examined every
strange face with cold and scrutinizing
suspicion, and even my taxi-driver, a
small mousy man, kept his fear-laden
dark eyes continually reverting to the
mirror as he whirled me through the
slight evening traffic. I was surprized,
therefore, in view of this mutual distrust,
to find that Jason Carse, a veteran crimi-
nalist, had discharged all of his servants
and was living alone in his grim house
behind a barricaded door.

The most unpleasant shock was the un-
accountably cold manner in which Carse
received my visit, and his positive annoy-
ance that I had forced myself so unex-
pectedly upon him. He would not ex-
plain why he had discharged his servants,
nor the secluded life he was now leading,
but there was little difficulty in realizing
the fatiguing effects which these recent

440

WEIRD TALES

crimes had pronounced upon him. He
was virtually a stranger as we met. in the
hallway and shook hands.

"I wish you'd go to a hotel," he said
bluntly. "I don't want anyone here."

But I didn't go to a hotel. I told him
flatly that there was no other course open
to me but to stay and take care of him;
for obviously he wasn't taking care of
himself, and his dismissal of the house-
hold help had precipitated a needless bur-
den on his already over-laden shoulders.
He needed food, for he was thin to ema-
ciation, and I made him dress at once and
accompany me to a restaurant where 1
saw that he ate a decent meal. I then led
him to the theater, a particularly lively
musical comedy, and kept him in his seat
until the curtain had fallen. But my ef-
forts seemed of no avail, as he was con-
tinually depressed and absorbed in his
own reflections. That night before retir-
ing he came to my room and again asked
me to leave.

"It's for your own good," he said with
strange harshness. "For God's sake be-
lieve what I say!"

For the next several days I watched
him sink lower and lower into de-
spondency of so contagious a nature that
I felt the insufferable pangs of it myself.
He worked late at night on the murder
cases, referring constantly to autopsy pro-
tocols and police memoranda, and more
than once I saw him reading his Bible.
On several occasions he visited the county
morgue and examined the remains of the
Head-hunter's victims, and following
each such visit he lapsed into a state of
mental and physical agitation that ex-
hausted him within a few hours.

The nights were almost unbearable,
and I would lie awake for hours listening
to the mumbles and moans which came
from his room, oftentimes distinguishing
such words as "God forbid it! God forbid

it!" and frequently he would scream the
word "Head-hunter." There was no
doubt that Carse had delved too deeply
into this case, and that hour by hour he
was descending into the clutch of a dan-
gerous neurosis.

During my stay with him I engaged
several servants, but he discharged them,
and I was unable to reconcile him to my
point of view. His resentment of my visit
became more acute as the days passed,
and I was beginning to fear that he would
forcibly eject me.

It was easy to explain this increased
irritability, for I myself, as well as every
soul in the city, was nervously awaiting
the next prowl of the Head-hunter, and
in it I recognized more fuel for the fire
that was burning Carse' s reason. He was
waiting for the fatal Monday night as a
man waits for his doom, and each hour
found him closer to a mental attack. On
Sunday afternoon I discovered him in my
room packing my luggage.

"You must go now," he said. "I ap-
preciate your interest in me, but now you
must go — you must!"

The tremor of anxiety in his voice
nearly convinced me that he was right,
but doggedly I clung to my set purpose to
save him in spite of himself. I could not
leave him alone in face of the develop-
ments which would occur sometime be-
tween then and Tuesday morning, and
I told him so.

"Fool!" he exploded; "I can do noth-
ing with you. Stay if you wish — but it's
on your own head! - '

The irony of that final statement,
whether intentional or not, is something
I shall remember to my grave. I don't
think that Carse meant it literally — on
my own head — but I was unable to shake
his words out of my ears, and through-
out the night and the following day they
hung about me like a dirge.

Carse did not sleep at all that Sunday

THE HOMICIDAL DIARY

441

night, but paced up and down in his
study while a fierce, alarming expression
hardened on his features. Nor could I
sleep, for his continued pacing tore my
nerves to shreds, and I spent the night
alternately in my own room and at the
partly open doorway of the library, where
I was able to watch him in secrecy. Sev-
eral times 1 saw him bend over a small
book and study it with the intent regard
of a disciple, and each time that he re-
ferred to a certain page he pounded his
fist on the desk and cried to himself:
"God forbid! God forbid!"

I should have realized what he meant.
I should have known and been prepared,
but how blind my friendship made me to
the horrific implication of those repeated
words!

Monday came and went in a slow driz-
zle of rain which only added to the
somber quiet of the city, and as the eve-
ning approached and wore on I felt my-
self caught in the irresistible tide of fear-
ful anticipation which warned of the
sixth appearance of the Head-hunter. The
streets were deserted throughout the day,
and with but few exceptions the only
pedestrians were police officers, who now
traveled in pairs or squads. The evening
papers were brutally frank in predicting
that before dawn a sixth headless corpse
would be discovered, and this expecta-
tion was shared by all.

Carse was at home all day and refused
to answer the telephone or to allow me
to answer it for him. He ate sparingly,
with his same preoccupation, and, con-
trary to my expectations, he appeared to
have lapsed into a state akin to normal-
ity, like a man who contemplates a pre-
ordained and inexorable occurrence.

At six o'clock he came to me, ghastly
haggard and thin, and again asked me to
leave his house, but I refused this zero-
hour request. He shrugged and went
back to his study. I watched him for a

while and saw that he was studying that
queer little book which so deeply affected
him, and I again heard him utter those
despairing words: "God , forbid! God
forbid!"

I went to bed at a little after ten and
tried to sleep, but the city-wide ex-
citement seeped into my room and kept
me tossing from the thrusts of night-
mares. At midnight Carse came up and
stopped just outside my door, obviously
listening to determine whether I was
asleep. The silence was uncanny for a
moment; then I heard a sharp metallic
clicking and he went on to his room.
After he had closed his door, I swept my
sheet aside and went to my own door.
Carse had locked it from the outside!

I called to him for an explanation of
this conduct, but he either didn't hear me
or chose to ignore my requests, for the
house remained grimly silent. Returning
to bed, I managed somehow to doze off.

At two o'clock I was awakened by the
sound of someone's walking in the hall-
way. I sat bolt-upright in bed and heard
the unmistakable approach of footsteps
coming down the corridor from Carse' s
bedroom. The tread was stealthy and de-
termined, and as it drew closer to my
room I was conscious of a cold mask of
sweat clinging to my face, because the
footsteps did not sound like those of
Jason Carse!

The feeling hit me and hit me again
until I was left stunned with the horror
of it. It did not sound like Carse! But
if it was not Carse, who was it?

I wanted to call out his name, yet I
felt, with some indefinable sense, that
the treader in the hall was unaware that
I was in the house, and for that reason it
could not have been Carse. I was afraid
to make an outer)', and I sat stricken with
dread as the footsteps went past my door
descending the stairs. A moment later

442

WEIRD TALES

there was a noise of cutlery being moved
in the kitchen, and the front door opened
and closed.

As it had come, that strange prescience
vanished and I tried to reason out what
I had heard. Of course the man was
Carse; who could it have been save him,
for were we not alone in the house? I sat
for hours on the bed working up a deter-
mination to shake the truth out of him
when he returned, but shortly after four
o'clock my strength ran out of me and I
shook with fear as I heard that awful
ghost-like tread ascending the stairs.
My heart beat wildly when the person
reached my door and twisted the knob to
enter.

One thought flashed through my head:
Thank God the door was locked! The
terrible feeling that it was not Carse came
back upon me, and I sat motionless as I
listened to the sounds from outside. For
a moment there were no sounds from the
intruder, but I did hear a faint tap-tap-
tap like that of a liquid falling to the
wooden floor. In a minute the knob was
released and the footsteps continued
down the hall to Carsc's room.

Any attempt to explain my thoughts as
I sat smoking throughout the night would
only add to the confusion of these rev-
elations. They were not sane and rational
thoughts, but rather strange suggestions
and premonitions. I thought myself to
be in the presence of a tremendous evil.

In the morning Carse was up early,
and moved back and forth in the corri-
dor with strange industry. He was cry-
ing, for his sobs came disturbingly to my
ears, and once I heard him descend into
the cellar and there was a faint digging
sound as he performed some outlandish
task. Then I heard him in the hallway
and on the stairs. I heard the splashing
of water and the sound of scrubbing.

I pounded on the door for him to let
me out, but it was not until nearly noon

that he finished his chores and finally
opened my door. He was stooped and
fatigued, and without bothering to return
my amenities, he turned away and went
to his study.

I went into the hallway and noticed, as
I had surmised, that the floor showed
signs of recent and vigorous cleaning. I
walked down to his room and looked in,
not surprized to notice that here, too, was
the unmistakable evidence of scrubbing.
I knew there was only one more thing to
do; I must go down to the cellar and un-
earth what he had buried there!

The horrible truth had been dawning
upon me for hours, and when I came
face to face with him in the kitchen at
the head of the cellar stairs I looked
squarely into his eyes with the full real-
ization that Jason Carse was the Head-
hunter.

I was not frightened — not for my per-
sonal safety, at any rate — but a sensation
of sickening horror went through
me as I looked into his tired face and
understood that at last he had fallen into
the cesspool which had tormented him
since early years. The words of the coro-
ner came back into my ears: "He is a
madman of uncanny intelligence," and I
knew that he knew I recognized him for
what he was.

The awful silence of our conflicting
glances was unbroken for several seconds,
and then words came uncontrollably from
my mouth and I managed to snap that
nerve-cracking tension.

"What's in the cellar?" I cried. 'What
have you buried there?"

"If any tiling happens to you," he re-
turned, ignoring my questions, "I am not
to be blamed. I warned you in time to
get away from this house. What do you
think is in the cellar?"

"I dare to suggest there are six small
graves."

THE HOMICIDAL DIARY

443

An ugly smirk went across his face and
he cast a glance at the cellar door.

"You always were too smart for your
own good," he said softly. "Knowledge
can be dangerous.*'

"How did you think you could get
away with it?" I screamed, only too well
aware of his implication. "My God,
Carse! Six human heads!"

His jaw hardened and he took a men-
acing step toward me. Then suddenly
he stopped, a queer tragic expression com-
ing over his face. He put his hand to
his eyes as if to blot out some horrible
memory.

"I know, I know!" he cried hysteri-
cally. "Six heads — six human heads! Do
you think I planned six heads?"

A shudder went through him and he
buried his face in both hands and sobbed
like a child.

My personal fear gradually subsided as
I watched this remorseful quiescence
which had come upon him. I realized
that he had passed the emotional climax
of his crime, and that he was now suffer-
ing that terrible reaction which must
haunt and terrify all criminals. I took
this advantage to gain control of him, for
there was no way of determining when
his madness would flare again.

"There is only one course open for
me," I told him soberly. "I must turn
you over to the police. Things like this
must be stopped."

He pulled his hands away from his
face and stared at me, his eyes fired with
dread. "No, no!" he screamed. "Don't
give me away. Please, in the name of
God, don't give me away! I am sick, I
tell you! I am not responsible!"

A feeling of helpless pity went through
me as he sank to his knees in hysterical
imploration, but I steeled myself against
him. The man was mad and dangerous.

He must be stamped out without mercy.

"There are asylums " I began.

"You cannot!" he cried. "You know
what they do in asylums. / know! Please
help me. I am not responsible. It is the
book — the book,"

"What book?"

"Drukker — diat diary! Can't you see
what it has done to me? It's eaten into
my brain until I am mad. It's driven me
like a slave until I have no other bidding.
It taught me how to do these things. It
makes me do them."

I pulled him to his feet and shook him
unmercifully. He was crying and retch-
ing, a pitiable and horrible sight to look
upon.

"You are talking irrationally," I cried.
"I am your friend and I want to help you,
but my first duty is the public welfare.
There are six human heads buried in your
cellar. There must be no more."

"No more?" he laughed shrilly and
threw up both his hands to indicate the
count of ten. "No more, you say? There
will be ten more before it stops. Ten
more! That's what the book says!"

"You want ten?" I demanded incred-
ulously, struck numb by his callousness.
"You want ten more to add to those six?
Carse, Carse! They are not cabbages you
are counting; they are human heads. Do
you think I am a fiend to let this con-
tinue? No; it must end — it must end on
the gallows."

"He died on the gallows!"

"He? Whom are you talking about?
Try to make sense, Carse. I am your
friend; trust me."

"I am talking of Emil Drukker — the
man who taught me how to do these
things. He is responsible for them, not
I. He is the one to hang for them. Dig
him out of his grave and hang him
again!"

444

"WEIRD TALES

I pushed him gently into a chair, for
his collapse seemed imminent. Spittle
was running from his mouth, and his
retching continued in spasms that shook
him to his teeth.

"I am your friend," I told him again.
"I want to help you, but you must get
control of yourself. Why do you say you
are not responsible? What drove you to
commit these crimes?"

He looked at me searchingly and his
eyes cleared. He swallowed a mass of
incoherent words in an effort to master
himself; then his hand pressed over mine.

"You are right; I must get control of
myself," he said. "I have done some hor-
rible things which can never be forgiven,
but I swear to you that I have not done
them intentionally. And I am not mad as
you think. I am in the power of that
book. I am the puppet of a horror that
has outlived all natural deaths."

A feeling of relief passed over me as
I saw him settle into a state of rational
observation. I hoped it would last, for
not three yards away from him, lying on
top of the kitchen table, was a seven-inch
butcher knife. My only hope was to pre-
serve his state by permitting him to tell
his story, and in that way to persuade
him to accept the inevitable consequences
of his crimes. I drew up a chair beside
his own, yet kept myself alert to ward
off any lunge he might make for the
knife.

"What is this horror which has mas-
tered you?" I asked in an effort to gain
his confidence. "And what is this book?"

"I told you about it in my letter from
Vienna six weeks ago. I told you I had
discovered a rare book — an awful and
compelling book. It was the diary of
Emil Drukker."

"Where did you get it?"

He cast a swift glance about the room,
then suddenly his eyes fell upon the
butcher knife. I saw him tense, saw his

lips twitch under the lash of a horrible
temptation.

"Carse, tell me about it!" I yelled, to
distract him. "Where did you get the
book?"

He pulled his eyes away from the knife
and let them burn into my face. For a
moment, undecided, he was silent; then
his brows straightened and he leaned for-
ward in his chair.

"Do you remember my Graz thesis? It
was based upon the life of Emil Drukker
in an effort to explain what impulse drove
him to cut off human heads. It was a
good thesis, one of the best on the sub-
ject, and it brought a lot of response from
criminologists all over the world. About
six months after it was published I re-
ceived a letter from a man who was once
Emil Drukker's personal servant. He was
living in Cologne right close to the old
Drukker castle, and he wanted to see me.
He told me that he knew the Drukker
crimes from the first to the last — sixteen
of them.

"So I went, of course, and met this
man, who was small and old, with an ob-
session for Emil Drukker. He talked for
a long time, and then he handed me the
diary and said it explained more vividly
than I could ever imagine the impulse
which prompted Drukker's recurrent hu-
man decapitations. He told me that
Drukker had written each entry while the
memory of the crime was still fresh in his
mind. It was a terrible book to read, he
warned, and unless I had the intellectual
strength of a mental Hercules I would
never forgive myself for having opened it.

"Naturally I was too excited to heed
his warning, and on that same night I
took the book away with me. I promised
to return it to him when I had finished,
but he wouldn't accept this plan. Instead
he said that he would come and get the
book when I was through. It was a mys-
terious business and should have told me

THE HOMICIDAL DIARY

445

to expect no good to come of it. I asked
him how he would know when I had fin-
ished with the book, and I shall never
forget that evil smile and disdainful
shrug of his response.

" 'I shall know well enough when I
read the newspapers,' he told me. 'This
time it will be six or seven — in about four
months from now.'

"Do you understand what he meant
by those words? He knew what would
happen! And yet he let me carry that
book away with me! In the name of
God, what kind of a man is he?"

"Why didn't you destroy die book?"
I demanded of him.

"I couldn't! It was too fascinating, too
powerful to destroy. I read that book
with the reverence of an ecclesiastic until
I knew every word between the covers,
and die whole ghastly parade of Druk-
ker's sixteen murders passed before my
eyes like figures on a stage. Ten weeks
ago I began to have nightmares that re-
constructed the crimes of Drukker, going
chronologically from Number One to
Number Sixteen, then beginning all over
again.

'"When I returned to America seven
weeks ago I still had the book with me,
and the contents were so deeply engraved
on my brain that I could think of nothing
else. Day and night I thought about it,
until at length I found myself actually
imagining how I would go about emu-
lating his crimes. Then I began to get
the horrible impulse to fondle a butcher
knife — Drukker used a butcher knife, you
know! — and more than once I was struck
with the scarcely resistible urge to ait off
someone's head. It didn't matter whose
head — but just a head!"

"Easy, Carse!" I cried with a wary
glance at the kitchen table. "Tell me the
rest, but don't excite yourself. What hap-
pened then?"

He slid back in a sort of stupor,
shook his head several times, then
passed his hand across his eyes in a ges-
ture of despair.

"You ought to know damned well
what happened if you were listening at
your door last night. Six weeks ago I
went to bed and dreamed horribly. I
had just finished reading the first confes-
sion in the diary — some strange impulse
made me read that confession and no
other — and in my sleep I saw a human
head staring at me. It was a cruel, Teu-
tonic head, and I knew that it was Emil
Drukker's head hanging in a gallows
rope. Then he smiled at me; a horrible,
vivid, real smile, and the head vanished.
From then on, for how long I cannot say,
I sat as a spectator and watched the com-
plete action of Drukker's Number One.

"I saw Drukker leave his house and
walk down a dark street with no other
illumination than a few scattered electric
lights. I tried to imagine how they were
electric lights, for they had only gas in
his day, but nevertheless they were mod-
ern lights, and the street looked like the
street in front of my own house. He
walked about ten blocks; then he saw a
woman standing on a street corner.
There wasn't another soul in sight. He
crept closer to her, then drew out his
butcher knife, and hid it in the folds of
his coat — a coat wiiich looked strangely
like my own wind-breaker. He first tried
to talk with the woman, but she was not
interested; so he pulled out the knife and
brought it sweeping down across her
throat. The blood spurted like a foun-
tain and overran Drukker's hand, but he
only laughed and pushed the woman to
the ground, then knelt over her and be-
gan a horrible sawing movement with
his knife. When he had finished, he
drew a towel from his pocket and
wrapped the head tightly to prevent the
blood from trailing him home. He came

446

WEIRD TALES

back the same way and entered the house,
and at the foot of the stairs he unwrapped
the towel and held the thing only by its
hair as he climbed the steps. The last
thing I saw or heard was the blood drip-
ping on each step as he ascended to the
upper hall."

"My God!" I whispered in horror.

"But that's not the worst," Carse cried
as he grabbed my arm. "When I awak-
ened the next morning it was late and the
shrieks of the newsboys stabbed into my
ears. They were yelling about a cruel,
brutal murder which had been committed
sometime during the night. I swung my
feet off the bed to arise, when my eyes
fell upon the diary which rested on my
night-table. It was open to the confes-
sion of Number One as if I had been
reading it in my sleep. There was a
strange and terrifying dread in my soul
as my feet struck the floor. I felt some-
thing wet and sticky touch my toes; then
I looked down. It was a woman's head
staring up at me.

"The room was smeared with blood
from one end to the other, and there was
a gore-caked knife resting beside the
head, and a crimson towel lay across my
bedpost. But there wasn't a drop of blood
on my hands!

"I couldn't even attempt to explain it.
I only knew that a woman h$d been mur-
dered and that her severed head was in
my bedroom. I didn't know what to do.
I couldn't force myself into the belief that
I was the murderer, and I stood stunned
with the weird horror of knowing that
Emil Drukker's Number One had been
re-enacted and that I had played his own
role. Where could I turn? Whom could
I ask for advice? If I was mad they
would commit me to an asylum; if I was
not mad they would hang me.

"I carried the head to the cellar and
buried it; then I cleaned up the blood
and burned the towel. In my wardrobe I

found a suit of clothes smeared with fresh
blood. I found my shoes and hat splat-
tered with it, and then I found my dis-
carded gloves stained a violent crimson,
with each finger stiffened as the blood
had coagulated about it. No wonder
there wasn't any blood on my hands!

"I went over the house from top to
bottom and eradicated every stain that
might be evidence against me; then I sat
down with the diary in one hand and
the morning newspaper in the other. I
compared the two crimes. They were
identical, even to the burying of the
heads. Emil Drukker had done exactly
the same as I had done: he carried the
head in a towel, he left it in his room over-
night, he buried it in his cellar, and he
cleaned up the blood the following morn-
ing. But there was one ghastly differ-
ence: Emil Drukker had committed his
crime with full purposeful foreknowl-
edge, whereas I had committed my crime
under hypnotic inducement!

"There is no other answer for what
has happened in these last six weeks. I
have racked my brain to find another so-
lution, but there is none. I am being
hypnotized by some unexplainable force,
and once each week I come under the
power of this evil which directs and com-
mands my being. Last night I went to
bed with the full knowledge of what
would occur during the night. That is
why I locked you in your room. This
morning when I awakened I found the
head exactly where the other five had
Iain; then I carried it to the basement and
buried it. I cleaned up the blood and
burned the towel.

"If you are numbed with horror, try to
imagine how I feel about it. Six crimes
in six weeks! And I can only thank mer-
ciful God that it will end with only one
more. Perhaps it is ended now. That
German servant who loaned me the diary
said it would be only six or seven."

THE HOMICIDAL DIARY

447

"Do you think the police will believe
all of this?" I demanded. "What you
have told me has no sane explanation.
It — it's dcmonism!"

Carse smiled pitiably. "There are
more things in heaven and earth,"
he began; then he heaved his shoulders
as if flinging off an attempt at levity.
"The human mind is a strange organ,
and no man can explain its mysteries. I
have seen too much of atavism to ridi-
cule any theories. There is nothing we
can do but wait and hope that the Ger-
man servant's prediction is true. Six or
seven. Six — or seven?"

"Do you mean you expect me to grant
you leniency?" I exclaimed. "Great heav-
ens, Carse, there have been six horrible
murders! Society demands a reckoning."

"I have atoned enough for ten times
six!" he cried. "Have you no soul in you?
The crimes will stop now. The German
said they would, and everything else he
predicted has come true. As my lifelong
friend it is your duty to see me through."

"But those six "

"No man can bring them back to life,
but I am still a living man and you must
save me. I shall divide my estate among
the families of the six, and I swear to
you that I shall never open a book on
criminology again. You must do it — you
must!"

"Do you honestly believe it is over?"
I asked hoarsely.

"I do; with all my heart and soul, I
do!"

"But you would say that anyway," I
cried. "Suppose there is a Number
Seven? The blood will be upon my hands
as well as yours. It is an awful respon-
sibility, Carse. There must be no more."

"There won't be. I swear there won't
be!"

He threw himself at me in an hysteri-

cal outburst of emotion. He tried to
smile through the tears in his eyes, but
the sight was so awful that I turned my
head. »

"I am still unconvinced," I said grim-
ly. "The possibility of Number Seven is
too important to overlook. Let me see
Drukker's diary."

"Why?" he backed away and stared at
me. "Why do you want to read the
diary?"

"I want to read account Number
Seven."

Carse came forward again and grabbed
my arm. He shook it. "What good will
that do?" he asked anxiously, "if there
are only six of them? Besides, it's not a
book you ought to read."

"Give me the diary!" I demanded
again.

He scowled at me for a moment; then,
shrugging, he reached into his pocket and
withdrew a small leather-bound book. It
was well worn, as if by many thumbs,
and in faded gold letters across the cover
were the words: Personal Diary of Emil
Drukker, J. U. D.

"Sit down," I commanded. "And try
to keep your nerves together. I shall do
everything I can for you."

He backed away and dropped into a
chair, his eyes fastened upon me in a look
of almost majestic joy. And yet there was
an undertone in his expression which I
could not define. There was defiance
there and fear. One of his hands rested
on the near-by table, less than two feet
from the hilt of the butcher knife, and
the fingers of that hand twitched nerv-
ously.

With an odd sense of uneasiness I
flicked open the first several pages
of the book and skimmed through the
contents. My German was poor, yet I
was able to understand the significance of
what Emil Drukker had written in his

448

WEIRD TALES

large, scrawling hand. I read the first
six accounts, then stared at Carse in
amazement. His six crimes and Druk-
ker's first six were so identical they might
have been conscious reproductions. In all
cases the victims were the same sex, the
same age, and were in the same general
walk of life. I then turned to account
Number Seven and after reading a few
wretched lines I gasped with horror: /'/
was a seven-year-old girl!

Carse was on his feet, his jaw grim
and determined. He stared fiercely at
me, waiting my response.

"Carse," I muttered dazedly, "it —
it "

"You can't back out," he cried as he
stepped toward me. "There will be no
seven, I tell you. It's ended on six. I
swear it to you!"

"No," I said, "I cannot permit such a
risk. Did you read account Number
Seven? He not only cut off the head, but
he dismembered "

"You can't back out!" he screamed as
he shook my arm. "You can't, you
can't!"

"But Carse, this is a girl — a mere
child. Don't you realize it would be un-
pardonable even for you? No, I can
never take such a risk. I must turn you
over to the police."

Carse slapped me viciously, then stum-
bled back against the table. His face was
a mask of suffused blood, his eyes wild
with desperation.

"Damn you!" he cried savagely. "You
are no friend; you're a cheat, a betrayer!"

Suddenly his groping fingers touched
the butcher knife and he drew himself
taut. His fingers wound around the hilt
like slowly moving worms. For a mo-
ment there was scarcely a breath between
us; then he lifted his arm and brought
the knife slowly out before him. I
watdied, horror-stricken, unable to lift
my feet from the floor. A numbing

paralysis of fright seemed to come over
me.

"Carse, Carse!" I muttered.

He didn't hear me; his body was tensed
for the deadly spring that would bring
him down upon my throat. I saw a rip-
ple of galvanizing energy race through
his hands; then I managed an outer)'. At
the same instant he was in the air.

There is no need for me to relate the
events which followed; for the news-
papers had assiduously described the cap-
ture and arrest of Carse, and his subse-
quent history, brief as it was, has become
public property. To my dying day I shall
carry the five- inch scar along my cheek
where his knife descended upon me, and
I can never cease to be thankful for that
one outburst of absolute fear which tore
from my lips and attracted a passing po-
liceman; otherwise I might have been
Number Seven in the grim line of epi-
taphs that marked the close of this fan-
tastic case. Only by bludgeoning Carse
with his stick could the officer overcome
him, and it was necessary to keep him in
a strait jacket until the hour of his execu-
tion. %

It is a curious fact that the psychiatrists
who examined Carse, several of them his
former pupils, could not find him un-
balanced enough to be irresponsible for
his crimes. Those long and tiring vigils
in the mental clinic will haunt me for
life; there was no end to their searching
and probing of his subconscious mind, no
end to the tests and questions, the ex-
aminations and analyses which ended
hopelessly against him. But even if they
had found him insane, violently and
homicidally insane, they would not have
dared report such a finding to the court.
Society demanded a death in return for a
death, and Jason Carse was nailed to his
cofhn at the first moment of his arrest.
Had he been spared the gallows by the

W. T. — 4

THE HOMICIDAL DIARY

449

court, he would not have been spared the
gallows by the mobs that milled about the
detention prison; for continually through-
out the trial was the grim reminder that
society represented by mobs has not yet
forgotten the use of lynch law.

Carse's death put a definite end to the
head-hunting crimes in this city, and for
the first Lime in over six weeks the met-
ropolitan area has been able to breathe
freely. I have lost a faithful and sincere
friend; but I lost him, not on the gallows,
but three months ago when he first dis-
covered the diary of Emil Drukker.

It is the diary, not my mourning, which
has prompted me to pen this account of
my knowledge of the head-hunting
crimes. During the trial, as you may re-
member, I sought to introduce the diary
as major evidence in support of Carse's
somnambulistic manias, but it was waived
out of court with ridicule and contempt.

One must admit that Carse's story as he
told it to me, and as I later reiterated it
to the court, was fantastic and highly im-
probable. But there are certain irrefut-
able arguments in support of Carse's
story which shed a terrible light, not
alone upon the case, but on all criminal
cases of similar nature. For one thing,
a hypnotic examination by competent state
alienists was completely unsuccessful in
the attempt to bring forth his subcon-
scious knowledge of any of the six mur-
ders. Secondly, Carse was unable, despite
his most intense and willing efforts, to re-
construct even the smallest part of any
one of the crimes. His only acquaintance
with his own alleged activities was
brought to him in dreams.

A further significant fact, which the
court ignored as irrelevant, was the ghast-
ly identity of Carse's supposed crimes and
those confessed by Emil Drukker. It is
impossible that this duality of murders
could be brought about by mere coinci-
dence, for the similarity of detail was car-
W. T. — 5

ried too far. This fact alone presupposes
the statement that there was a horrible
and unnatural bondage between Emil
Drukker and Jason Carse — the Bondage
of the diary!

One night of each week for six weeks
Jason Carse was compelled by some un-
known power to dream about a murder
confessed and described in Drukker's di-
ary. On each of these nights, while Carse
watched it in a dream, an identical mur-
der was committed somewhere in the city
and the man whom he recognized as the
murderer was Emil Drukker. It was as if
Carse's dreams, projected into reality by
the sheer vividness of the diary, had res-
urrected Emil Drukker from his grave
and set him free to re-enact his former
crimes!

I am mad, you will say; but I speak of
demonism and not law. How else can
you explain the duality of these murders?
How else can you explain Carse's igno-
rance of the crimes? How else can you
explain those brutal dreams, the fruit of
whose reality Carse found each morning
on the floor beside his bed? Nor is it
enough to stop alone with this question.
How many men besides Jason Carse have
spent sleepless nights over the diary of
Emil Drukker?

The newspapers will answer that ques-
tion each time they are opened; in Paris
the police discover a headless body ly-
ing along the wharves, and the murderer
is still unknown; in Berlin a college pro-
fessor kills himself upon the discovery of
a human head lying near his bed with
his own hunting-knife stuck to the hilt
into its brain; in Stockholm the police
discover the bodies of two women lying
in an empty house — their heads have not
yet been found; and in Cleveland, one of
our greatest cities, is reported the discov-
er)' of the tenth headless corpse in a se-
ries of murders that has gripped the city

450

WEIRD TALES

in terrof. What kind of person com-
mits such crimes? And why do the miss-
ing heads turn up years later in the base-
ment of a house owned by a mild-appear-
ing and docile old man?

Jason Carse was not the first man to
pay with his life for crimes such as these,
nor is he the last. It is well to beware
of sickish-smelling trunks that are left in

deserted houses, and I caution the reader
against stepping on misshapen bundles
of clothing which he may find half hid-
den in a clump of bushes.

For the diary of Emil Drukker is miss-
ing from the drawer where I left it, and
I have been told that a strange, German-
ic-looking man was seen prowling about
the house just before its disappearance.

Vhe

Arm

By FRANZ HABL*

Creeping, writhing, insidiously crawling and groping, the long arm
reached out in its ghastly errand of death

I HAD been out of Germany for
thirty-five years, drawn hither and
thither by various glittering of will-
of-the-wisps. When I returned to my na-
tive country, I was as poor in pocket as
when I left, and much poorer in illusions.

The Berlin insurance company which
I had represented with such mediocre suc-
cess in Switzerland, Austria and Belgium
agreed to let me sell for them at home,
and by a curious coincidence there was an
opening in the quaint old Bavarian city in
which I had been born and bred.

I will pass over the strangely mingled
feelings with which I rode in a Twentieth
Century railroad train past the thousand-
year-old walls of one of the most curious
ancient cities in Europe, a town more-
over whose every winding narrow street
and sharp-gabled building had been the
companion of my infancy and childhood.
No one seemed to know me, and I recog-

Adapted by Roy Temple House from the German.

nized no one. For several days I made no
attempt to sell life insurance, but wan-
dered in a dream, the bewildered ghost
of my former self, about the spots which
I had known in happier days.

One dull rainy afternoon I took refuge
from the weather in a dingy little coffee-
house in which, at the age of fourteen or
fifteen, I along with certain boon com-
panions, had learned the gentle art of bil-
liards. It seemed as if every article of
furniture was just as I had walked away
from them, well toward half a century
before. It was raining outside, and I sat
alone in the gloomy, smoky old place,
pondering the sweet and bitter mysteries
of life.

While I sat thus, staring out with un-
seeing eyes at the rain which was by this
time beating down smartly on the pave-
ment, I became conscious that someone
in the room was staring at me. I had not
noticed that there was anyone else in the

THE LONG ARM

451

dark, low-ceilinged place except the ob-
sequious proprietor who had served me
my cigar and coffee. Now I realized that
a man who sat in the corner diagonally
across from me was studying me curiously
from over his newspaper. His face was
one that I had seen before. Suddenly,
across all the years, I remembered him.
And in that same moment he rose and
came toward me with his hand held out.
We had been in school together, in the

Gymnasium. He had been a strange fel-
low with few friends, but had enjoyed
the reputation of being the best student in
his class. But in his last year in the Gym-
nasium he had, for what reason I never
knew, excited the animosity of a cantank-
erous old professor who had publicly de-
clared that Gustav was not the kind of
boy who should have a Gymnasium di-
ploma and that he, the professor, was de-
termined never to give him a passing

452

WEIRD TALES

grade. My father had admired the boy
very much, and at one juncture when my
marks looked perilously low, he had
employed Gustav to tutor mc. Gustav
had been so successful that Father was
delighted and made him a present of a
silver cigarette case with Gustav's initials
and mine engraved on it. I remembered
all this very distinctly as we shook hands,
but I was doing fast thinking, because
for the life of me I couldn't remember
his strange last name. I had a feeling
that it was a very foreign name, Polish
or Croatian or something of the sort. As
he mentioned this and that, I fear I
answered him a little absently and inco-
herently. The name was almost there.
The syllables flitted tantalizingly just out
of my reach. But I was sure the name
began with a B. Wasn't it a Bam- or a
Ban -something? Ah! I had it. Banaoto-
vich!

From that moment the conversation
went more easily. I was surprized and
pleased when Banaotovich drew his silver
cigarette-case out of his pocket to prove
to me how highly he thought of my
poor deceased father. We were soon
launched on a cordial exchange of child-
hood memories. Banaotovich seemed a
good-hearted fellow after all, and I
wondered why in my childhood I had
never been quite comfortable in his com-
pany. I remembered that other boys of
the group had admitted to me confiden-
tially that they were more than a little
afraid of him.

The longer we talked the more inti-
mate, the more in the nature of a
mutual confession, our conversation be-
came. I admitted to Banaotovich that the
hifalutin fashion in which I had left the
town to win fame and fortune years be-
fore, had been asinine in the extreme,
and that it served me just right to have
to sneak back unknown and penniless.

Banaotovich rejoined that for all his
pride in his school marks he had re-
mained a person of no importance, and
that the pot had not the slightest inten-
tion of making itself ridiculous by calling
the kettle black. He seemed almost pain-
fully inclined to run himself down. I
could feel in his manner a sort of pathetic
reaching out for sympathy and consider-
ation. And it began to seem as if he
were about to tell me something or ask
me for something. But whatever he had
to tell seemed hard to say, and it was
slow in coming over his lips.

Banaotovich ordered two bottles of the
heavy native wine. I drank sparingly of it,
because it goes to my head. But Banaoto-
vich swallowed two or three glassfuls
in hasty succession, and his cheeks grew
flushed. There was a pause. Suddenly
he leaned across the table toward me and
spoke in a hoarse, excited whisper.

"Modersohn," he said anxiously, "I
want to make a confession to you — a
terrible confession. It may turn you
against me completely. Maybe you don't
want to hear it. If you don't, say so, and
I'll go home. But it seems as if I've got
to tell somebody about it. It seems as if
I've got to find somebody who under-
stands me and can excuse me, or it will
kill me. Shall I tell you? Shall I?"

I was startled. I was reasonably sure
that Banaotovich was no criminal, since
he had lived half a century in his native
city, undisturbed and from all he had
told me solvent and respected. I had al-
ways known that he was a queer fish, a
brooding, solitary sort of person, and I
settled myself to listen to some harmless
bit of psychopathy which meant nothing
except to the unfortunate subject.

"My dear fellow," I said, no doubt a
little patronizingly, "I am sure you
haven't anything to confess that will
make you out an outrageous rascal, but if

it will do you any good to tell me your
troubles, I am ready to listen to them."

"Thank you," said Banaotovich in a
trembling voice. "I've done nothing that
they can put me behind the bars for.
But I— I "

He stared at me sternly.

"But I've done worse things," he said
solemnly, "than some poor fellows that
have been strung up by the neck and
choked to death!"

I laughed, a little nervously. "Tell me
your story, if you like," I said, "and let
me decide just how black you are. But I
haven't a great deal of apprehension.
We're all of us poor miserable sinners, as
far as that's concerned. I could tell you
things about myself "

Banaotovich was not listening to me
at all. He had fallen suddenly into a
fit of black brooding. After a minute or
two, he looked up and asked sharply:

"Do you remember Wolansky?"

Wolansky was the Greek professor
who had threatened to vote against Bana-
otovich when he was finishing his course
at the Gymnasium.

"Of course," said I. "And I remember
well how he abused you that last year.
If there ever was a cantankerous old
scoundrel, Wolansky was just that identi-
cal individual!"

"Maybe," he said absently; then after
another pause:

"Do you remember that Wolansky
died suddenly, just a litle while before
the end of the school year?"

I nodded. "I imagine that was a great
piece of good luck for you," I said.

"Yes," said Banaotovich. "If he had
lived, I should never have had my di-
ploma. As it was, I finished with honors.
If Wolansky hadn't died when he did,
I'd have been ruined. Don't forget that
— ruined!"

I was puzzled at his insistence. "Yes,
you would have been seriously handi-

capped," I agreed. "Ruined is the word,
perhaps."

Banaotovich's face was purple with
wine and some strange kind of suffering.
"Do you remember another tiling?" he
said thickly. "Do you remember an old
Hindoo who had a dark little hole away
back of the shops and the beer depot
and the livery stables between the Old
Market and the river?"

"The old fellow that had love charms
and told fortunes and helped people to
health and wealth and happiness?" I
said in a tone of slightly forced cheer-
fulness. It was hard to be cheerful with
those somber eyes boring into you. "Yes,
I remember him, all right. I wanted to
go and see him once, when I was about
fifteen or sixteen, but Father told me
that meddling with the black -art had sent
more people to hell than it had helped.
And Father was so terribly earnest about
it that he frightened me. I never went.
As a matter of fact it was only a passing
fancy, and I soon forgot all about him."

"That Hindoo," said my old school-
fellow thoughtfully, "knew things about
the secret forces in the universe that made
him almost a god. And he taught me
things that the wisest philosopher in the
world doesn't suspect. Still, your father
may have beeen right. I think it very
likely that what he taught me may send
me to hell!"

I shivered. I looked up nervously to
make sure that the way was clear to the
door. I began to suspect that my friend
Banaotovich, though he was certainly
not a criminal, might be a dangerous
lunatic.

My vis-a-vis rubbed absently at a pro-
tuberance on his left side. I had noticed
it when he first came across the room to
speak to me. A deformity — I was sure
it had not been there when he was a
boy — or perhaps a tumor or some such
thing as that.

454

WEIRD TALES

"I kept very quiet about what the
Hindoo taught me, because I knew most
people felt about such tilings much as
you say your father did. And I wanted
to get on in the world. But I had an
idea the Hindoo could help me get on.
Perhaps he has "

And he stared gloomily at space.

"Perhaps he has. And perhaps he
hasn't."

He brooded. Then he took up the
thread of his story.

"Wolansky nearly drove me to sui-
cide. I read and studied and crammed,
day and night. I tried everything I could
think of to overcome the man's antag-
onism. I crawled in the dust before him
like a whipped cur! Nothing did any
good. And when I saw he hated me and
was determined to smash me, I began to
hate him, too. I came to hate him worse
than I hated the devils in hell. There
was a time when I had to hold myself
back with all my strength to keep from
sticking a knife into him or braining
him with a chair. But the Hindoo and
I made some experiments with telepathy,
and I discovered that there are other
ways of killing a man besides stabbing
him or giving him poison.

"I learned how to make a man in front
of me on the street turn around and look
at me. I learned how to make you dream
about me and come and tell me the
dream the next morning" (when he said
that, I jumped, for I remembered having
done exactly that thing!). "I learned how
to bring out a bruise on Wolansky's face
although he lived on the other side of
town; so that he went around asking
people how he could have bumped his
forehead without knowing it. And at last
I went to bed" one night, set my mind
on Wolansky, and said over and over to
myself a thousand times: Die, you dog!
You've got to die! I order you to die!

"I said it over till I fell into a sort of

trance. It wasn't sleep, I tell you. You
can't sleep when you are in a state like
that. And in my trance, I could feel an-
other arm grow out of my side here and
grow longer and longer, and grow out
through the window although the win-
dow was closed, and grow out across the
street and down the street and right
through the walls and across the river.

"I had never known where Wolansky
lived. But that night I knew. I had
never known the street or the house num-
ber. I had never been there in my life.
But I can tell you just exactly how his
bedroom looked. The wash-stand be-
tween the two windows, the work-table
against the west wall, the wardrobe, the
old divan against the north wall. In a
corner the blue-gray tiled stove with
some of the tile chipped off. And against
the south wall — the bed he lay in. I
can tell you the color of the blanket he
pulled up over his face. It was a dirty
brownish red.

"But my hand seemed to go through
the blanket and grip Wolansky by the
throat. First he sighed and turned his
head to one side and tried to wriggle
free. Then he raised his arms and tried
to get hold of something that wasn't
there. His sighs turned into groans, and
the groans changed to a death rattle. He
threw his arms and legs wildly around
in the air, his body bent up like a bow.
But my hand held his head down against
the pillow. At last he quit struggling
and dropped down limp on the bed.
Then the arm came crawling back in to
my body, and I came out of the trance — ■
and went to sleep — or perhaps I fainted.

"The next morning the director came
into our classroom and told us Wolansky
had died in the night of some sort of
attack. You remember that, I am
sure "

When Banaotovich began to tell me
this story, he had looked away from me,

THE LONG ARM

455

and his eyes never met mine during the
telling. He had begun with a painful
effort, but as he went on he grew more
and more excited and more and more
inflamed with hatred of the malicious
old Greek teacher, till it almost seemed
as if he had forgotten me and was living
the astounding experience through for
himself alone. When he was through, his
ecstasy of indignation left him and he sat
dejected and apprehensive, studying me
pitifully out of the corners of his deep
gray eyes.

When he stopped speaking, there
was a moment of silence. Then I
said something. I think what I said was,
"Very extraordinary!"

He smiled, a strained, sarcastic smile.
"Extraordinary?" he repeated, with an
interrogation point in his voice.

"Your nerves were strained to the
breaking-point," I said. "Your trouble
with the old rascal had driven you half
distracted. Then there was all that oc-
cultistic hodgepodge with the old Hin-
doo. And you were overworked and run
down, anyway. No wonder you dreamed
dreams and saw visions. And it may have
been that there was some telepathic con-
tact between you and Wolansky, and

when he had his apoplectic attack "

The sarcastic smile deepened on Bana-
otovich's face. "So you have it all ex-
plained, and I'm acquitted?" he inquired.

"Acquitted?" I cried. "You were
never even accused. If the state were to
bring action against every man who had
a feeling that he would be happier if
someone else were out of the way, the
state would have a big job on its hands!"

"Very true," Banaotovich assented
icily. "I see I haven't got very far with
you yet. You are forcing me to continue
my not very edifying autobiography. —
Did you know my father?"

I remembered his father, and I remem-

bered that he had not enjoyed the best
possible reputation.

"I think I knew him," I said hesi-
tantly. "He was a — a rrioney-lender,
wasn't he?"

"Don't spare my feelings," said Ban-
aotovich bitterly. "He was a usurer, and
a cruel one. I had a feeling for years
that his business was a disgrace to the
family, and I made no bones about tell-
ing him so. There were ugly scenes. I
thought several times of leaving home.
Finally, Father told me one day that
since I didn't approve of the way he got
his money, he was doing me the favor of
disinheriting me. I told him that was all
right with me, that I'd rather starve than
live on money that was stained with the
blood of poor debtors.

"I thought at the time that I meant it.
But about that time I had become inter-
ested in a young woman. I had never
had much to do with the girls, and very
few of them seemed at all interested in
me. But this one appeared to like me,
and when I made advances to her, she
didn't repel me. I am no connoisseur of
female beauty, but I think she was un-
usually attractive, and at that time I was
half mad about her. Still waters run deep,
you know.

"Well, she had me under her spell so
completely that I changed my mind about
Father's money. I began to truckle to
him, much as I had truckled to Wolansky.
I began to feel him out to find whether
he had made a will. He was very cold
and non-committal. Finally I asked him
outright if he would reconsider his de-
cision to leave me penniless. He told me
it was I that had made the decision, not
he, and that he had no use for wishy-
washy people that changed their minds
like weather-cocks. He was very sarcastic.
I lost my temper and answered him back.
We had a terrible quarrel, and finally he
— he struck me. I was twenty years old

456

WEIRD TALES

and a bigger man than he. And I think
no man ever had more stubborn pride,
at bottom, than I have.

"It was the Wolansky tiling all over
again. The humiliation, the effort at in-
gratiation, the failure, the long, eating,
gnawing, growing hatred. And it — it
ended the same way. The night of
brooding that hardened into a devilish
decision, the vision of the long arm,
growing, stretching, crawling — but not
so far this time, only through two walls
and across our ow T n house. You remem-
ber that Father died of an apoplectic
stroke, just as Wolansky had done a year
or two before."

"Yes, I think I remember," I said in
considerable embarrassment. The thing
did begin to look uncanny. I was
thoroughly sorry for the poor, cracked
fellow, but I would just as soon not have
been alone with him in that solitary
drinking-place in the twilight.

"Well?" he said, almost sharply.

"Well, Banaotovidi," I answered with
a show of confidence, "you have had a
great deal of unhappiness, and you have
my sympathy. This strange faculty you
have of anticipating deaths, like the
night-owls and the death-watch that ticks
in the walls, has made these bereavements
an occasion of self-torment for you. I
think you should see a psychiatrist."

"Anticipating — anticipating?" Bana-
otovich had gone back and was repeat-
ing a word I had used, and as he repeated
it he drummed madly on the table with
his fingers. "It's a curious coincidence
that 'anticipating' is just the word my
wife used when I told her about it."

"You — told — your wife — what you
have just to)d me?" I stammered. "Do
you think that was wise?"

"I couldn't help it," he said with a
catch in his throat. "I thought I loved
her, and I had to talk to somebody. I
was miserable, and I had a feeling that

she might understand and be brought
closer to me by sympathy. Now that I
think of it, I can see that I was an egre-
gious idiot, but I discovered long ago that
we aren't rational beings after all. We
are driven or drawn by mysterious forces,
and we go to our destination because
we can't help it.

"My wife had always seemed a little
timid with me. I never seemed to have
the gift of attracting people. And I don't
know whether she would ever have been
interested in me at all if I hadn't used a
little — a little charm the Hindoo taught
me. Perhaps that didn't have much to do
with it — but I had never been happy with
her. However that may be, one evening
when she seemed unusually approachable.
I had just the same impulse that I had
when I met you here tonight, and I told
her about Wolansky and Father. She
pooh-poohed it all just as you did. But
she was afraid. I could see that. She was
more and more afraid of me as the days
went by. For a long time she tried to be
cordial and natural in my presence, but
it was a sham and the poor thing couldn't
keep it up. Each of us knew as well what
was in the mind of the other as if we
had talked the situation over frankly for
hours. We reached the point where we
couldn't look each other in the face. No
solitude could have been as ghastly as
that solitude of two people who shared a
revolting secret. For I had convinced her
that I was guilty. I had succeeded in
doing what I had set out to do, and I had
ruined two lives in doing it. I have the
faculty, it seems, of poisoning whatever
I touch. Only today, my wife said to
me "

I started to my feet with a great rush
of relief and thankfulness. "Ah, your
wife is alive, then?" I cried.

"My wife is alive. That is — my second
wife is alive," he said, with a horrible
forced smile.

THE LONG ARM

457

I sank back gasping. "What did you
do with your first wife, you dirty hound?"
I moaned in helpless indignation.

HE closed his eyes, and a wave of
bitter triumph played about the
muscles of his mouth. "Have I convinced
you too, at last?" he said.

Then I realized mat I had been an
insulting idiot. At worst, the man before
me was a pathological case, and he cer-
tainly belonged in an asylum rather than
in a prison.

"Forgive me, Banaotovich," I panted.

"I don't know what made me "

He looked at me sadly, almost com-
passionately. "There is nothing to for-
give," he said, very quietly. "I am all
you called me and a thousand times
worse. Now let me finish my story."

"You don't need to," I said hastily.
"I know all the rest of it."

All interest, I am afraid nearly all
sympathy, had gone out of me. What I
wanted most of all was to get away from
this melancholy citizen with power and
madness in his gray eyes.

"No, you don't know quite all of it
yet," he insisted. "Perhaps if I tell you
the whole story, even if you can't excuse
me — and I don't deserve your excusing,
I don't want your excusing — you can
understand me a little better, and diink of
me a little more kindly.

"There was another woman. I couldn't
help it, any more than any of us can help
anything. A fine, sympathetic young
woman, who loved me because she knew
I was unhappy. I had been married to
the other woman for four years. We were
completely estranged. We could scarcely
bear to speak to each other. I couldn't
be easy one moment in the same house
with her. I had a cot in my office out in
town because I couldn't even sleep sound-
ly at home. It was hell. The terror in
her eyes made me physically sick. My

wife learned about the other woman. My
wife was a devout Catholic, and there
was no possibility of a divorce. I could
read in my wife's face just what went
on in her mind. She knew the other
woman had become my only reason for
living. And one day I read in her eyes,
along with the terror, a glint of desperate
determination. She knew she was in
danger, she knew I had a power that I
could exercise when I chose in spite of
all the courts and police and jails in the
country. She knew her life was in
clanger, and her eyes told me that mine
was in danger for that very reason. I
didn't blame her. Half my grief through
all the years had been grief for her.
But the instinct of self-defense in
me was strong — and — she went — too —
like "

He never finished his sentence. He
dropped his head on the table and began
to sob hysterically. I laid a gingerly
hand on his shoulder.

"Banaotovich," I said unsteadily.
"I'm sorry /or you "

He sat up and supported his chin in
both hands. "I haven't been as — as bad
as all this sounds like," he said after a
while. "Before I was married a second
time, I went to the chief of police and
gave myself up. The chief listened to my
story — I didn't try to explain it all, as
I've done with you, but just blurted out
the main facts; but the longer he listened
the uneasier he became, and when I got
through he asked me nervously if I didn't
think I ought to go into a sanitarium
for a while. Then he bowed me out in a
big hurry. Perhaps if I had told him all
the ins and outs of it, it might have been
different "

"But don't you think he's right about
the sanitarium?"

"Right? I'm as sane as you are. I've
killed three people, a crazy scoundrel, a

458

WEIRD TALES

hard man, and a pure, innocent woman.
But I did it all because I had to. A sani-
tarium wouldn't do me or anyone else
any good, and it would be a heavy
expense. I have taken the responsibility
for another pure, innocent woman, and I
must support her. The war and the de-
pression swept away my father's fortune,
and my present business has dwindled
away till I am making only the barest
living. I have applied for the agency
for a big Berlin insurance company, and
if I can get it, along with my other busi-
ness, I shall be fairly comfortable. But I
understand there is some talk of their
sending in a representative from outside.
If they do that, if they take the bread out
of my mouth like that, it won't be good
for the outsider!"

He was drunk, and his drunkenness
was working him into an ugly mood. He
was dangerous, and physical courage was
never my strong point.

"What is the name of the Berlin com-
pany?" I asked timidly.

He named the firm I myself worked
for. Then he fumbled for his bottle,
and with stern and painful attention set

about the difficult and delicate task of
filling his glass again. I muttered some-
thing about being back in a moment,
and made for the door. He was too busy
to pay any attention to me.

When I had the door safely shut be-
hind me, I sprinted through the rain to
my hotel as if the devil himself were
after me. . . .

It was a long time before I got over
waking up in the middle of the night
with the feeling that an icy, iron-
muscled hand was clutching at my throat.
I don't have the experience often any
more, but I have never seen the city of
my birth since that awful night. I got
out on the midnight train, and my com-
pany obligingly gave me territory on the
other side of Germany.

Some time ago I happened to see a
notice in the paper to the effect that a
certain patient named G. Banaotovich
had died suddenly in the Staatliche
Nervenheilanstalt in Nuremberg. But I
have met the name rather frequently of
late, and I think it is a fairly common
one. I didn't investigate.

"She whirled and undulated to the barbaric
rash of the music."

Vhe

<= ^ke of Life

By EDMOND HAMILTON

'A weird -scientific thrill -tele of adventure, mystery and romance — of the waters
of immortality, the strange Red and Black cities, and the dread Guardians
that watched eternally over that terribly glowing lake

The Story Thus Far

"TT^V EEP in the unexplored jungles
' B of equatorial Africa lies the
Lake of Life. It is a lake of
shining waters that contain the pure es-
sence of life, the origin of life on earth,

and it is guarded by unhuman, terrible
beings, the Guardians. And anyone who
drinks of those shining waters becomes
immortal!"

That is the legend of many African
tribes. Asa Brand, senile American mil-
lionaire morbidly afraid of death, believes

This story began In WEIBD TALES for September

459.

460

\VEIRD TALES

that legend and thinks if he drinks of
those waters his life will be vastly ex-
tended. So he has offered Clark Stan-
nard, young adventurer, a half-million
dollars if he procures for him a flask of
waters from the Lake of Life.

Clark Stannard does not himself be-
lieve the shining waters will confer im-
mortality, but has undertaken the quest.
His five hard-bitten followers are Blacky
Cain, gangster; Mike Shinn, former
heavyweight prizefighter; Lieutenant John
Morrow, disgraced army officer; Link
Wilson, a Texan cowboy; and Ephraim
Quell, former Yankee sea captain.

The quest has brought the six into a
hidden land surrounded by the Moun-
tains of Death, mountains which it is
death to tread upon. They have gained
entrance to the prisoned land by floating
down a wild river that flows in through
a chasm in the mountains.

In this hidden land they find two cities
of white people, at war with each other.
They are K'Lamm, city of the Reds, and
Dordona, city of the Blacks. Clark and
his five men repel a band of black war-
riors who attack them, and capture their
leader. The leader is Lurain, wildcat
daughter of the ruler of Dordona.

Then they are surrounded by a large
force of Red warriors from the near-by
city K'Lamm. Clark learns that the Lake
of Life exists somewhere near the city
Dordona. The Dordonans hold it is sac-
rilege for anyone to try to drink of the
Lake of Life. But the people of K'Lamm
thirst to drink of it and become immortal;
so that there is war between the two
peoples.

Clark Stannard believes that his only
chance of reaching the lake is to join
Thargo, king of K'Lamm, as an ally.
He agrees to go to the Red city, but stipu-
lates that the girl Lurain is his prisoner,
not anyone else's. The six American ad-

venturers and their prisoner and escort of
Red warriors are now riding into the city
K'Lamm.

The story continues:

6. The King of K'Lamm

The city K'Lamm was circular in
outline and more than two miles in
diameter, surrounded by a forty-foot wall.
The wall and buildings and cobbled
streets were all of quarried stone, stained
bright red by some secret of pigmenta-
tion. The buildings were mostly flat-
roofed, one-story ones, shops and stalls
and dwellings. The inhabitants were
swarming excitedly out of them as the
cavalcade rode down the street.

Clark saw that at least half the men
wore the crimson armor and the long
swords — it was a strongly military popu-
lation. The helmeted warriors, the sim-
ple architecture and weapons, all looked
medieval to Clark, as though the civili-
zation of this isolated, prisoned people
had not progressed further than the Mid-
dle Ages of the outside world. There
were many women, wearing extremely
scanty white tunics that came only to their
knees and left half their white breasts
bare.

"Say, there's some good-lookin' dames
in this burg," said Mike Shinn, the prize-
fighter's eyes sweeping the crowd.

"And there are a lot of hard- looking
warriors here too," Clark reminded him
grimly. "Hands off, Mike."

"What the devil, we could put the
blast on this mob easy," sneered Blacky
Cain. "There isn't a gat in the whole
crowd."

The men and women of K'Lamm
seemed inspired with savage fury as they
saw the girl prisoner in black armor, in
front of Clark.

"Death to Lurain of Dordona!" they

yelled, shaking swords and fists in impre-
cation. "Death and torture for the Dor-
donan wench!"

Lurain looked neither to right nor left.
Again that strong, unwilling respect for
the girl stirred in Clark Stannard.

"You are still our prisoner," he leaned
forward to tell her. "They shall not take
you from us."

"I do not fear them — nor you," snarled
Lurain without turning. "The day comes
when this Red spawn go to their doom."

At the end of the broad avenue down
which they rode loomed the largest build-
ing in the city. It was an hexagonal scar-
let tower, blunt and truncated, a hundred
feet high, a squat, ugly structure. They
dismounted in front of it, and the Red
captain Dral strode to them.

"The king Thargo has been already in-
formed of your coming and anxiously
awaits you," he informed Clark smoothly.

"Lead the way," Clark said curtly.
"Our prisoner goes with us." And as
they started forward he muttered to his
men, "Keep close together and don't
make a move unless we're attacked."

They followed Dral into the building,
past red-armored guards and down corri-
dors. Dral clanked in the lead, Clark fol-
lowing with the girl, her dark head high,
his five men rolling belligerently along
and staring about with frank curiosity.

They emerged into a large, round ban-
cjueting-hall with red stone walls, lit by
shafts of sunset from slit-like windows.
All around it were tables, empty now ex-
cept for one raised on a dais. There alone
sat a man in the red helmet and armor, a
great jewel blazing on his breast. Behind
him hovered a wrinkled-faced, withered
old man with sly eyes.

"The strangers and the captive, great
king," announced Dral as he paused and
bowed to the sitting man. The man
stood up.

"You are welcome, strangers," Thargo

told Clark. "Yes, more than welcome,
when you bring as captive Lurain of
Dordona."

Thargo, king of K'Laram, was a big
man. Well over six feet he towered, and
his shoulders were as broad as Mike
Shinn's. His shining red armor well set
off that towering, great- thewed figure.

There was power in his face, not only
the arrogant consciousness of utter
authority, but hard power innate in the
man himself. It was in the square, merci-
less mouth, in the flaring nostrils, strong-
est of all in the black, penetrating eyes
behind which little devil-lights of mock-
ery and amused contempt seemed to
dance.

"Be ready for trouble," Clark muttered
to his men. "It may pop right this
minute."

For Dral, the Red captain, was now
making a respectful report to his lord.
And Thargo stiffened as he heard.

"So you claim the Black girl as your
prisoner?" he said to Clark, his eyes nar-
rowing.

Clark nodded curtly. "We do. We
took her, and she is ours."

"Now why, strangers from outside,
did you penetrate this land?" Thargo
asked thoughtfully. "No others from
outside have ever crossed the death
mountains and entered. What object
brought you here?"

"In the great world outside," Clark
told him, "there are legends of a strange,
shining lake in this land. We came in
search of that lake, and once we find it,
will return with some of its waters to our
own land."

"The legends you heard were true,
strangers," said Thargo, with changed
expression. "That shining Lake of Life
does exist in this land, but not here, not
at K'Lamm. For many generations we
of K'Lamm have been striving also to
win to that lake. It may be," he added

462

WEIRD TALES

craftily, "that you and I should become
allies. Dral tells me your weapons are
strange and powerful. Together we
would have no trouble in winning to the
Lake of Life."

"Never will you win to the Lake, Red
dog!" lashed Lurain's silver voice sud-
denly. "Even if you conquered us of
Dordona, there are still — the Guardians."

"The Guardians?" echoed Thargo,
then uttered a deep laugh. "Why. the
Guardians are but a myth, a legend. For
ages that myth has kept you of Dordona
from the lake, but it shall not keep us.
No!"

His nostrils were flaring with abrupt
passion, his black eyes suddenly all devil.
Clark seemed to glimpse in the man's
wolfish face a long- repressed, eating am-
bition, a desire of superhuman intensity,
baffled and raging. Then Thargo smiled
smoothly at him.

"We shall talk of these things later,
strangers. Meanwhile, you arc welcome
in K'Lamm. Tonight we banquet here in
your honor, and until then the finest
rooms in this palace are yours."

"Our prisoner goes with us," Clark
said coolly.

"Your prisoner goes with you, of
course," Thargo agreed smoothly. "But
guard the little wildcat well, I warn you.
I do not think she could escape from
this palace" — a gleam of mirth crossed
his eyes — "no, I do not think that, but
she might do harm if not guarded.

"Dral will conduct you to your
rooms," he finished courteously. "Until
tonight, strangers."

Clark bowed curtly. Then, taking
Lurain's tensed arm, he followed the
suave captain out of the great banquet
hall. His five men strode after him, and
Dral led the way up a broad stone stair
to an upper floor of stone-walled corri-
dors and rooms. He conducted them into
a suite of four large rooms.

Tapestries depicting combats of red
and black armored soldiers hung on
the walls, and lay on the floor. There
were chairs and couches, and a series 'of
great windows whose unshuttered open-
ings looked out on the flat red roofs of
K'Lamm, gleaming in the sunset. Dral
bowed and left them, closing the door.
The girl Lurain went over to the window
and stood, a slim figure, looking silently
out over K'Lamm.

"Say, what was all the powwow
about?" Blacky Cain asked Clark. "This
moll seemed to get the big shot's goat."

Clark told them briefly what had
passed between him and Thargo.

"As far as I can see," Clark finished,
"our best course is to play along with
Thargo until we find out where we
stand. He wants to get to the lake, that's
evident — he believes that stuff about its
waters conferring immortality. It's also
evident that Lurain's people, the Dor-
donans, prevent him from reaching the
lake and would prevent us also. Our best
chance to reach this Lake of Life may be
to throw in with Thargo."

"Why didn't you give up this girl to
the Red king, then?" asked Lieutenant
Morrow. "It would put us in solid with
him."

"But Thargo would likely have had
her killed or tortured," Clark objected.
"It's plain he'd like nothing better."

"Well, what if he did?" shrugged the
young ex-army officer indifferently. And
Morrow's face was bitter with memory
as he added, "Keeping her our own pris-
oner may wreck everything — it won't be
the first time a woman's done it."

"Why, ye heartless scut," said Mike
Shinn wrathfully, "would ye give up a
spunk)' girl like that to be killed?"

"We're not giving her up," Clark said
decisively. "I want to question her about
the Lake of Life."

He advanced toward Lurain, and the

THE LAKE OF LIFE

46*3

Dordonan girl turned and met his gaze
defiantly, with hot, stormy blue eyes.

"Lurain, just where is the Lake of
Life?" Clark asked. "If you told us that,
it may be we'd let you escape from here."

"Would you?" asked Lurain doubt-
fully, coming closer to him. Clark nod-
ded quickly, in affirmation.

"Yes, we would. Can you tell us how
to reach the lake?"

Lurain came so close that the haunting
perfume of her blue-black hair was in his
nostrils, her troubled eyes raised.

"I cannot tell the secrets of the sacred
lake," she said slowly, worriedly. "But
I can tell you — this!"

And her hand suddenly jerked out the
sheath-knife at Clark's belt, and stabbed
it with lightning speed at his heart.

7. Thargo's Treachery

Instinct can save itself where the
momentary delay of reason would be
fatal. It was not the first time in his life
that Clark Stannard had seen the swift
deadly flicker of steel licking toward his
heart. The sight exploded his brain and
body into instant action.

He threw himself staggeringly back-
ward, and the bleak steel whizzed down
through the front of his shirt, scoring his
breast like a white-hot wire. Before
Lurain could turn the blade and strike
upward, Clark's brown hand grabbed her
wrist. He twisted it, and was not gentle.
There was a cold, savage anger in his
brain. The knife clattered to the floor
from the twisted hand. Lurain's blue
eyes blazed out of a paper-white face, but
she uttered no cry of pain or fear, hate
throbbing from her.

"So you'd trick me, would you?" spat
Gark harshly. "You'd kill me to keep
me from reaching your sacred lake, eh?"

"Yes, I would!" Lurain's voice cracked
like a silver whip. "You who would be-

come Thargo's ally, who would help him
and the other blasphemers of K'Lamm
who lust for the lake — you deserve
death!"

"I warned you," Lieutenant Morrow
told Clark bitterly. "All women are alike
— just playing you for a sucker."

"Say, the dame's got nerve!" said
Blacky Cain, respect and admiration in
the gangster's pale eyes.

"She sure has," grinned Link Wilson.
"Reminds me of a litle Mex down in
Agua Prieta who tried to knife me one
night, when "

"Hell, we can do without auto-
biography," rasped Clark. "Bring cords
and we'll tie her hands — she's not safe
unbound."

When they had finished securing the
bonds around Lurain's wrists, the Dor-
donan girl sat and glared at them fiercely.

"Someone has to stay here and watch
her while we're down at this banquet,"
Clark declared. "Not only because she
might escape, but because I don't trust
Thargo too far. Quell, will you stay?"

"I'll watch her," Ephraim Quell
nodded dourly. "Don't ngger I'd care
much for the goings-on down there, any-
way."

Night fell quickly. From the window,
K'Lamm stretched a mass of dark, flat
roofs in the starlight, with windows and
doors spilling red torchlight. Somber
against the climbing stars bulked the
looming, mighty barrier of the Moun-
tains of Death.

Clark and his men shaved, brushed
their clothes, and made what improve-
ments they could in their appearance, by
the light of the flickering torches servants
had brought. Then Dral appeared, his
long sword clanking on the stone floor
as he entered.

"The lord Thargo awaits you at the
banquet, strangers," he said, his eyes
flickering toward the bound girl.

464

WEIRD TALES

The great, round banquet hall flared
brightly with ruddy torchlight when
Clark Stannard and his four companions
entered it after Dral. Now the tables that
ran around the room were laden heavily
with cooked meats and fruits and big
glass flagons of black and yellow wines.
At them sat more than a hundred men
and women, the nobles and artistocrats of
feudal, medieval K'Lamm.

The men wore the red metal-mesh
tunics and their swords, even at table.
The women wore chitons of red stuffs
much like the garments of the women
they had seen in the city, but richer, em-
broidered with gold and jewels. Their
upper breasts and arms were bare as in
the old Cretan costume. They drank and
laughed with the male feasters. But they
and all in the hall fell silent, staring in
eager curiosity at these five swaggering
strangers who first in all the history of
this land had entered from outside the
deadly mountains.

"Welcome to our feast, strangers,"
Thargo greeted in his powerful voice.
"Here are seats for you, and here are
wine and meats and women, for we count
you as ourselves who are, we hope, to be
our allies in the great quest we soon shall
make."

The Red king's face was frank and
open, the sincerity of his greeting warm-
ing. But, Clark wondered, was there not
a suppressed gleam in his black eyes, a
quirk of secret amusement?

Clark took the backless metal chair
held out for him, beside Thargo himself.
His four followers were distributed
further along the table. On the other side
of Clark sat a languorous beaut)' intro-
duced to him as Yala, the sister of
Thargo. Despite his inward alertness,
Clark could not but be moved to ad-
miration by the coal-black hair, smooth
ivory skin and audaciously revealed
rounded figure of this princess of

K'Lamm. Her velvety black eyes met his
curiously.

But he turned toward Thargo. He felt
that the time had come to learn what he
could of the mysteries surrounding him.

"You still wish us, then, to become
your allies in an attempt to reach the
Lake of Life?" he asked bluntly.

"Very much I wish it," Thargo
avowed frankly. "You carry weapons of
a power unknown here, and they will
make certain our victory; though I am
sure that even without them, we still
could crush Dordona."

"Where is the lake?" Clark demanded
directly.

"It lies beneath us," Thargo answered.
"Beneath us?"

"Aye," the Red king nodded. "Deep
beneath tin's prisoned land, under leagues
of solid rock, exists a great cavern, and
in that cavern lies the shining Lake of
Life."

"Then how in the world can you hope
to reach it?" exploded Clark, stiffening.

"There is only one way down to that
cavern of the lake," Thargo told him.
"It is a pit, or shaft, whose mouth is in
the city of our enemies, Dordona, near
the eastern edge of this land. The river
that flows through the mountains runs
across this whole land, and drops into
that pit.

"Long ago," Thargo continued, "our
ancestors came into this land from the
outside world. They climbed over the
mountains, for at that time, so legend
says, it was not death to tread the moun-
tains, as it is now. They explored the
land, and found the pit into which the
river falls, and went down that pit into
the cavern where lies the Lake of Life.
And they learned that if they drank
those waters they would become im-
mortal, but they were forbidden to drink
of them.

"They were forbidden, they said, by

W. T.— 5

THE LAKE OF LIFE

465

strange, unhuman beings who dwelled
down in the cavern of the lake and
guarded its waters of immortality. These
beings, the Guardians, bade those explor-
ing humans to return to the surface, and
never again come down to drink of the
waters, since that was an unholy thing.
So the men returned in fear to the sur-
face, obeying the command. And legend
says that the Guardians then cast a deadly
force on the mountains around this land,
which still invests them, so that no more
men might enter this land in future.

"The people who were already within
this land founded a city around the
mouth of that shaft to the underworld.
They called the city Dordona and over
the mouth of the pit they built a temple.
They considered it blasphemy for any to
think of descending the pit to the Lake
of Immortality and, in their superstition,
they slew any who dared to try it. For
they were in great fear of the Guardians
they believed dwelling below, though
none but the first explorers had ever seen
those beings.

"But as generations passed, age after
age, rebellion grew up in the city Dor-
dona. Many of its people said, "Why
should we die when beneath our feet lie
the waters of immortality? Who are the
Guardians, to forbid us the lake? Let us
not allow them to monopolize the waters
of immortality longer; let us go down
and drink of them whether they permit
it or not, so that we may become un-
dying.' "

Thargo's fist clenched, his eyes glit-
tered, as he continued, "Thus spake the
rebellious ones in Dordona! They sought
by force to enter the pit and descend to
the lake. But most of the Dordonans
were still swayed by superstitious fears
of the mysterious Guardians. They put
down the rebels by force, prevented them
from entering the pit. After that, the
rebels deserted Dordona and came here
W. T. — 6

to the western edge of this land and
founded a new city, this city of K'Lamm.

"And ever since then, we of K'Lamm
have desired to go back and conquer the
Dordonans and go down the pit to the
Lake of Life. We had not the strength,
at first. But during past generations,
more and more people have deserted
from Dordona to our city, coming to be-
lieve as we do that it is folly to grow old
and die when immortality is in our grasp.
So that now, stranger, we of K'Lamm
are powerful enough at last to attack
Dordona, crush the superstitious Blacks,
force our way down to the shining lake,
and drink its waters and adiieve immor-
tality!"

"You actually believe, then," Clark
Stannard said incredulously, "that the
waters of the lake would confer im-
mortality?"

"I am sure of it!" Thargo said, his
eyes flashing. "If we drink of them we
shall never die, for they contain the pure
essence of life itself. That fact, our ex-
ploring ancestors were sure about."

"Yet you're not afraid of meeting the
legended Guardians, if you penetrate to
the lake?" Clark asked curiously.

Thargo laughed contemptuously. "The
Guardians do not frighten us, for we do
not think they still watch down there by
the lake. No man has seen them for
ages, and even the few who saw them
ages ago were not slain by them. I
think that even if the Guardians still exist
down there, they will not be able to stop
us."

Here was a frank, unfearing skeptic,
Clark thought. It was odd that while
Thargo was so skeptical of the dreaded
Guardians, he still believed in the impos-
sible virtues of the shining lake.

"Why," Clark asked bluntly, "do you
want our help, if you have enough forces
to overwhelm Dordona, as you say?"

"We want it," Thargo said frankly,

466

WEIRD TALES

"not because we need your help — easily
can we overcome Dordona — but because
we do not want you against us, strangers,
with your strange, powerful weapons.
And for reward for joining us," the Red
king added, "you shall drink the waters
of the Lake of Life with us. You will
become immortal, strangers, as we will.'*

Thargo's black eyes flashed with
strange light, his fist clenched tight,
his voice pregnant with emotion.

"To be immortal — think what that
will mean! To stride the world undying,
generation after generation, feared and
worshipped by the races that continue to
die! By the sun, once I have drunk those
waters of undying life, I will go forth

from this prisoned land, will rule "

He stopped abruptly, glancing at Clark
with narrowed eyes. Then he continued
in a smooth, lower tone.

"But what is your answer, stranger,
now that you know the situation? Do
you join forces with us to attack Dor-
dona?"

Clark hesitated. A strong instinct told
him not to commit himself.

"I think we will join you," he said
slowly, "but before I give my word on
it, I must speak with my followers. If we
do join you, our reward is to be as much
of the shining waters as we wish to take."

"Has that Dordonan wench Lurain
tried to turn you against me?" Thargo
asked suspiciously. "Has she endeavored
to make you an ally of her doomed
people?"

"She tried to kill me, but an hour
ago," Clark said tartly. "There's no
danger of my becoming her ally."

Yet it seemed to him that smoldering
suspicion persisted in Thargo's eyes.
Then the Red king laughed and ex-
claimed:

"But we will talk further of this in the
morning. We neglect the feast."

He raised his big hand in a signal.
From an alcove suddenly thrummed
music, weird harmonies of plucked
strings. It throbbed louder, wilder, and a
score of supple girls in shimmering veils
rushed lightly to the center of the torch-
lit hall.

They began to dance in the space be-
tween the tables, swaying, whirling and
undulating to the barbaric rush of the
music, their white limbs gleaming
through the gossamer of the swirling
veils.

"Whoopee!" shouted Mike Shinn hap-
pily over the wild music, from down the
table. "This is better than a night-club."

"Don't bother me, Mike," drawled
Link Wilson, his tanned reckless face
bending toward a laughing girl beside
him. "I'm doin' right fine in sign-lan-
guage with this muchacba."

"I'll say this beats that damned jungle,
anyway," Clark heard Blacky Cain say-
ing with a rasping chuckle.

But Lieutenant Morrow sat drinking
and staring moodily, with bitter eyes, at
the whirling, weaving girls.

"You do not drink, lord from out-
side?" a soft voice reproached Clark. It
was Yala, the sister of Thargo, bending
toward him, her slender white fingers ex-
tending a goblet of the black, thick wine.
"Is our wine then so poor beside that of
the outside world?"

Clark took the goblet, tasted the
liquor. It was heady stuff, potent,
strangely scented. Yala's languorous eyes
approved as he drained the cup. An alert
servant refilled it from a flagon.

"Aye, drink all!" boomed Thargo's
powerful voice over the music. "Drink
to the day that is almost here, the day
when we of K'Lamm win at last to the
shining waters that will make us all un-
dying."

"To the day!" shouted the excited,
half- intoxicated feasters, draining the

goblets and setting them down with a
crash.

Clark Stannard felt sudden heady ex-
altation as he set down the goblet for
the second time. The wine sang in his
veins and suddenly life seemed wild,
sweet, thrilling. It was good to have
done with the old and outworn things of
the world he had known, to sit here with
this company in feast.

They were a good crowd, he thought
warmly, as he drained the goblet again.
They were making his men welcome, for
now Mike Shinn was standing up and
bellowing an Irish song, and they were
laughing and applauding. Morrow was
drinking heavily, silently, and the lank
Texan had his arm around the girl next
to him, and only Blacky Cain's dark,
predatory face still remained watchful as
the gangster sat there. What the deuce
was Blacky so watchful about? — every-
one here was their friend.

Thargo's powerful face had a smile of
complete friendliness on it. Damned
good scout, Thargo — by heaven, he and
his men would help Thargo conquer
those superstitious Dordonans! And the
girl Yala swaying languorously closer to
him, perfumed white shoulders and
breasts rising out of her red chiton like a
great lily, brooding sweetness of her
black eyes making Clark's swimming
senses reel!

"Are many men of the outer world as
hard and handsome of face as you, lord
from outside?" she whispered.

"That may be," Clark laughed, "but
or this I'm sure — no women of that outer
world are as beautiful as you, princess."

Her eyes were melting as she swayed
closer, and slender satin fingers touched
and twined about his in electrical con-
tact.

Then as he bent unsteadily toward
Yala, Clark just glimpsed an upward,
meaning flash of her dark eyes, directed

at Thargo. It chilled instantly through
the winy haze around Clark's brain.

Danger here! shouted an alarmed voice
inside him. He realized suddenly how
near he was to intoxication. That wine —
he'd already tossed off three or four gob-
lets of it. And Yala was proffering him
another beaker of the black stuff, with a
soft smile.

"Wine brings gracious compliments
from you, lord from outside. I would
hear more — so drink."

Clark took the goblet. But now his
half-hazy brain raced. Yala was trying
to get him drunk, that was certain, and
from the glance he had intercepted, he
knew it was at Thargo's orders.

Nevertheless he took the goblet. But
as he raised it, Clark feigned a far greater
dazedness than he felt, letting his gaze
wander dully, making his tongue thick
when he spoke.

"Shouldn't drink any more," he mut-
tered thickly to the leaning princess.
"Doesn't take much — to knock me out."

"But you do not wish, surely, to de-
prive me of further compliments?" Yala's
red, ripe mouth pouted bewitchingly.

Clark laughed unsteadily, though in-
wardly he was cold and alert. "Never —
never say no to a lady. Here's to your
eyes!"

He drained the goblet. The heady wine
made his half-numbed senses spin, but he
resolutely kept his head. Yet he feigned
now a complete intoxication, hurled the
glass away with a drunken laugh.

"Yala, I could give you compliments
all night," he said maudlinly. "You're
most — most beautiful woman — ever
lived."

As his eyelids pretended to droop,
Clark caught again that significant glance
from the girl to her brother. Then she
was leaning, her warm breath whispering
in his ears.

"Would "Ou rather tell me those

468

WEIRD TALES

things where there are not so many to
listen, lord from outside?" she mur-
mured.

"Sure, that's what we need — - a little
more quiet," Clark said sleepily. "My
head, too— feels funny "

"Come with me," she whispered
softly. "I will take you where it is quiet
— and where you can tell me all those
things."

Her soft hand under his elbow im-
pelled him to his feet. Clark swayed un-
steadily, blinking owlishiy over the torch-
lit hall and the noisy, riotous feasters.
His dulled gaze was really keenly alert.
He perceived that Shinn and Link Wil-
son were at the height of merriment with
their Red neighbors, and that Morrow
was still drinking heavily. But Blacky
Cain was still alert, could be depended
on to watch the others.

None of the feasters, in the din of
laughter, clinking goblets and
shouting voices, noticed as Clark Stan-
nard stumbled out of the hall with Yala
half supporting him. Yet Clark glimpsed
Thargo looking keenly after them.

He stumbled with the princess of
K'Lamm down shadowy stone halls, and
finally into a great chamber which
breathed of femininity. Silken hangings
of yellow were on die walls, in the soft
light of low-burning torches. Across the
room was a low, soft silken couch, and
above it a great window looked across the
starlit roofs of K'Lamm.

Yala spoke a few soft words, and the
two submissive-looking girls who had
hurried forward, hastily withdrew. The
Red princess led Clark to the couch, and
as he sat down unsteadily, looking heav-
ily about, she* poured more of the black
wine from a flagon in the room.

She drank also, her dark eyes look-
ing over the rim of the glass with an ex-
pression that, despite himself, stirred his

blood. Then she held the glass to his
lips, her fingertips caressing his cheek.

"Drink with me to our — friendship,"
she murmured.

Clark drank. His brain seemed to float
inside his skull as die additional alcohol
leaped into his blood, but every fiber in
him was taut and alert. He blinked at
Yala as though she was hard for him to
see. She came temptingly closer to him.

"Does the wine make me look — more
beautiful?" she asked provocatively. Her
arms went softly around his neck.

"Don't need wine for that," muttered
Clark. He set his lips against her half-
opened ones, his hands tightening on her
bare, perfumed shoulders.

He knew the kiss was as feigned on
her part as on his own. But for all that,
it was none the less wildly thrilling.
Then as she drew back a little from his
embrace, eyes searching his dazed-looking
face, Yala asked him seductively:

"Lord, tell me — am I more beautiful
than the Dordonan girl you took captive
— Lurain?"

"Much — much more beautiful," stam-
mered Clark, his eyelids drooping. "She's
just — little wildcat."

"Has Lurain asked you and your men
to help Dordona in the coming war?"
Yala asked him swiftly. "Has she made
any offers to get you to ally yourselves
with Dordona?"

Noiu, Clark knew suddenly, he had
discovered the reason for this subtle
temptation by Yala. Thargo was suspi-
cious! Suspicious that Clark might have
agreed with the Dordonan girl to aid her
people, that he might be intending to be-
tray K'Lamm! Thargo had had this girl,
one capable of tempting an angel, get
him intoxicated to question him.

"Lurain has not asked me to help Dor-
dona," Clark said thickly, his eyes clos-
ing, his body swaying sleepily against
Yala. "I — wouldn't listen to her if she

THE LAKE OF LIFE

469

did. The Dordonans she led tried to
kill me and my men. We're — going to
help Thargo conquer their city."

He heard the hiss of Yala's indrawn
breath. Then she murmured softly, "You
are tired, lord from outside. You must
rest."

He let himself fall like a log onto the
soft couch as she lowered him. Then he
heard Yala stand up quickly. She bent
over him as he lay with eyes closed, her
breath warm on his face. He breathed in
long snores, pretending heavy, drunken
sleep.

Satisfied, Yala went to the door of the
chamber and uttered a low call. Almost
at once, Clark heard the tramp of heavier
feet entering the chamber, two pairs of
them. The first voice that spoke was
Thargo's. He guessed the Red king had
been waiting outside.

"You heard?" Yala was saying swiftly.
"He is safely on our side — he will have
nothing to do with Dordona."

"Yes, I heard," Thargo said. "I was
suspicious because he would not give up
the Dordonan princess to us. But no
doubt he is keeping the girl for himself,
simply because she is pretty."

"That half-boy fighting cat!" said Yala
scornfully. "What would any man want
with her?"

The voice of Thargo's companion in-
terrupted. It was an age-cracked, ominous
voice Clark guessed to be that of the
withered old counsellor he had seen with
Thargo when he had first met the Red
king.

"Better to slay all these strangers to-
night, by surprize, and make sure," he
warned. "We of K'Lamm have more
than enough force to conquer Dordona
and win to the lake. We do not need the
strangers' help."

"No, we will not slay them, Shama —
not yet," Thargo said authoritatively.
"Their weapons are powerful, from what

Dral says. They might kill many of us
before we slew them all, and that would
be bad for the minds of our people at
this time when we are on the- very verge
of our long-planned attack on Dordona.
Besides, why not make use of these
strangers to make our conquest even
easier?

"This is what we shall do," he con-
tinued in a hard, rapid voice. "Four days
from now, as we have planned, we ride
to attack Dordona, and the strangers go
with us. In the attack on the Black city,
we will put them in the forefront. As
soon as we have won Dordona and our
way down to the Lake of Life lies clear
and open, then we shall turn suddenly on
the strangers and kill them all."

8. The Fight at the Gate

It was all Clark Stannard could do to
keep his body from stiffening betray-
ingly as he lay in pretended drunken
sleep, listening to those calmly treacher-
ous words. Blind fury burned in him as
he heard Thargo's callous plan to make
use of him, then dispose of him. Yet he
managed to preserve his appearance of
intoxicated stupor. His muscles tensed as
he heard Thargo's strong step come over
to the couch, and he knew that the Red
king was looking down at him.

"This drunken fool!" said Thargo
contemptuously. "If he is a sample of
the men of the outside world, they will
not be hard for us to rule, once we have
drunk of the lake and are immortal."

"Be not so sure," warned the old coun-
sellor, Shama. "This man and his com-
rades have courage and cunning, or they
could not have penetrated the death
mountains no men ever came through
before."

"He was not cunning enough," Thargo
said scornfully, "to prevent a woman's
eyes from making a sot of him. You did

470

WEIRD TALES

well what I asked, my sister. In fact, the
task did not seem distasteful to you."

"Perhaps not," Yala said' with a soft
laugh. "Fool he may be, but this man is
— different. Until he and his men ride
with your forces to Dordona four days
hence, I think to find him amusing."

"That is your affair," Thargo said in-
differently. "Best get him back to his
chambers now before his men miss him.
Shama and I return to the feast."

Clark heard the ruthless plotter and
the aged counsellor leave. Then Yala
bent over him, holding a pungent liquid
to his nose and shaking him softly.

"Wake, lord from outside," she said
tenderly. "You must not stay here longer
— my brother would be angry."

Clark was careful to awake slowly,
blinking and rubbing his eyes dazedly.
"More wine," he muttered thickly. "Got
to have more wine — so I can tell you —
how beautiful you are "

"You shall have opportunity for that
in die next few days," Yala promised
with a provocative smile. "You had best
return to your chambers now and sleep,
my lord. It seems that you are almost
overcome by my beauty — or the wine!"

She went to the door and called, as
Clark stumbled to his feet. A warrior in
the crimson armor answered quickly.

"This soldier will conduct you to your
chambers," Yala told him. "Until to-
morrow, lord from outside."

Her fingers clung warmly to his in
caressing promise. Clark nodded dazedly
and staggered out into the hall. He
stumbled with his guide by shadowy,
torchlit corridors, up a stair to the upper
floor. The warrior took him to the door
of their chambers, bowed and left.

But Clark's apparently owlish gaze
took in the fact that now there were a
score of armored guards posted unob-
trusively along the corridor outside their
chambers. That showed that Thargo was

still taking no chances — and that was
going to make things difficult.

Ephraim quell looked up in surprize
when Clark stumbled into the torch-
lit rooms and slammed the door. Quell's
eyes ran over Clark's disordered hair and
flushed face, and the girl Lurain, sitting
taut as a trapped tigress in a chair,
watched with bitter contempt.

"There's a Book that says, 'Wine is a
mocker, strong drink is raging,' "
twanged Quell, his bony face condemna-
tory. "Figger you might ought to have
read that, before you went down there."

"I'm not drunk," Clark rasped. "But
I've found out a lot and it adds up to the
total news that our lives are not worth
a plugged nickel if we stay around here."
Quell jumped to his feet in alarm.
"Go down and get the others up
here," Clark told him. "Don't appear too
urgent about it — but get them!"

Ephraim Quell nodded tightly, and
went out of the room. Clark Stannard
went rapidly across the room to Lurain.

Clark's mind, racing at top speed ever
since he had discovered Thargo's con-
templated treachery, had hit upon a des-
perate plan. It was a hazardous one but
the only one, as far as he could see, that
would give him and his men a chance to
reach the Lake of Life now.

To stay longer in K'Lamm would
merely allow Thargo to make pawns of
them and then kill them. There was but
one other possible course of action by
which they might win to the lake.

Lurain's blue eyes blazed hatred as
Clark approached. To her amazement,
he cut her bonds.

"Lurain, I must talk with you and talk
fast," he said swiftly. "I've discovered
that Thargo intends to kill me and my
men, as soon as we've helped him con-
quer your city of Dordona."

"I am glad!" she blazed. "Now you

THE LAKE OF LIFE

471

learn the full evil of these Red spawn.
They will kill me, but you also will die."

"Listen, you and your men came spy-
ing on K'Lamm to learn when Thargo
and his forces will attack your city, didn't
you?" Clark demanded, heedless of her
hate. "Well, I can tell you that. Thargo
and his men will ride toward Dordona
in four days."

"Four days?" whispered Lurain, her
face suddenly going dead white. "But
we did not dream he would attack so
soon — my people will be surprized — he
will overwhelm Dordona!"

"Exactly," rasped Clark. "He will, un-
less we carry a warning to Dordona."

"You mean you strangers will help me
escape, help me warn Dordona?" the girl
exclaimed, with sudden desperate hope.

"We will," Clark said grimly, "and
what is more, we will fight on the side
of Dordona in the coming battle. You
have seen how powerful our weapons
are — it may be that our help will turn
the tide against K'Lamm. But, for all
this, there is a price."

"What price, for your aid?" Lurain de-
manded.

"The price," Clark told her, "is this:
that when we reach Dordona, you shall
take me down the pit to the Lake of
Life, so that I may fill a flask with its
shining waters to take back to the world
outside. For that price, I and my men
will aid your people."

"No!" flamed Lurain, leaping erect,
her face blazing with wrath. "By the
sun, never will I pay that price! Ages on
ages have we of Dordona faith fully
obeyed the commandments given us long
ago by the Guardians below. Never have
we permitted one blasphemer to descend
to the lake. To allow you to do so would
be supreme sacrilege. I reject your pro-
posal. I would rather die!"

"But Dordona will die too, if it is not
warned," Clark pointed out. "Yes, all its

people will perish when Thargo leads the
armies to K'Lamm into the city in sur-
prize attack. And then Thargo will be
able to descend to the lake and drink of
it."

"The Guardians are there and will
destroy Thargo and his horde if they
dare descend," Lurain retorted fiercely.

"Are you so sure the Guardians are
there?" Clark said. "Are you sure they
exist? None in your city has seen them
for ages."

"The Guardians are there!" Complete,
unshakable faith of generations rang in
the girl's voice. "Though Thargo and his
spawn doubt their existence, they exist
and still ward the sacred lake. Their
powers are vast and they will slay any
who approaches the lake, doubt it not."

"But then, why not agree to let me
descend to the lake?" Clark pressed
quickly. "If the Guardians are there, they
will not let me touch the shining waters
anyway, will they? The blame will not
be yours, for you warned me. And by
agreeing to let me go down there, you
will save Dordona from surprize and
death."

Lurain's face expressed doubt, hesita-
tion, agony for her imperilled city. Clark
hung on her answer. He was hoping
the girl's blind faith in the legended
Guardians of the lake was strong enough
so that she would agree to let him go,
as she supposed, to his death.

She said finally, her voice low and
shaken, "It is true that the Guardians
will kill you when you descend to the
lake. The sin of letting you descend
there will be on my soul. But — Dordona
will be warned in time to prepare for
Thargo's attack.

"Yes, I agree," she continued with
desperate resolution on her face. "Help
me escape from K'Lamm, promise to give
my city your help in the coming war,
and when we reach Dordona I will show

472

WEIRD TALES

you how you may descend the sacred
shaft."

"Good!" Clark exclaimed, his heart
quickening with excitement. "Now if we
can just get safely out of K'Lamm "

The door opened, and Ephraim Quell
grimly entered, followed by Clark's
other four followers. Mike Shinn was
fighting drunk, bawling a song, his bat-
tered face glistening. Link Wilson too
was flushed with wine, but Lieutenant
Morrow and Blacky Cain were sober — the
first because the drink had not affected
him, the second from abstinence.

"What's the lay, chief?" rasped Blacky.
"Something wrong?"

"A lot wrong," Clark snapped. He
told them in curt sentences of Thargo's
plot. A vicious oath ripped from the
gangster.

• "Double-crossing us, eh? We'll go
down and put the blast on him, damn
him!"

"Sure, I'll choke the dirty scut with
me bare hands!" raged Mike Shinn furi-
ously.

"Listen," Clark rapped, "we'll have
all we can do to escape this trap with-
out bothering for revenge on Thargo.
We're going to get out of here, at once —
and join the people of Dordona."

Rapidly he told them of the agreement
he had made with Lurain. The Dordonan
girl stood tense and pale as he talked.

"It's a great idea!" exclaimed Blacky.
The gangster laughed. "We'll hand
Thargo a double-cross, and when we get
to this other burg, Dordona, we can easy
lift the water from the lake below."

"How are we going to get out of
K'Lamm?" Lieutenant Morrow asked
quickly. "How out of this palace, even?"

"We can't go down through the palace
itself," Clark said emphatically. "The
guards posted out there in the corridor

would give the alarm. There's the way
we'll have to take out."

He pointed to one of the big, open
windows, that looked out across the dark
city and the starry sky.

"We'll slide down from that window
on a rope of some kind," Clark' said
quickly. "Behind the palace I noticed a
court where the horses of the palace
guards are evidently kept at night. If we
can sneak back there and get mounts,
we'll make a dash out through the city."

"That's the idea," approved Link Wil-
son, his eyes lighting. "We can ride right
out through these hombres."

"What if die gates of the city wall are
closed?" Morrow asked.

Clark shrugged. "I don't think they
will be. I doubt if they close those gates
every night — this city fears no attack
from Dordona."

The six adventurers acted rapidly.
While Ephraim Quell listened watch-
fully at the door, Clark and the others
tore down the wall hangings and con-
verted them into heavy, knotted rope.
They tied the end of the rope to a heavy
chest, then dropped it into the darkness
outside.

The men quickly shouldered their
packs. Clark peered from the window.
There were no sentries in the palace
yard immediately beneath, though he
heard movement of some at die front of
the building. The walled courts in the
rear of the palace were silent except for
an occasional stamping of the restless
horses back there.

lark hung for a moment, transfixed
V^4 by the weird beauty of the scene.
The moon was rising above the mountain
wall in the east, a flood of silvery light
pouring across the prisoned land. And
bathed in the moon slept the city
K'Lamm, a sea of dully gleaming roofs
and streets and squares. Solemn and

THE LAKE OF LIFE

473

somber bulked the dark mountains,
crouched above the city. Then Clark
Stannard snapped out of the spell.

"Come on, that moonlight will make
it harder for us," he whispered urgently.
"Lurain, you follow me closely."

"Yes, Stannar," she whispered, ap-
proximating as closely as she could the
name she had heard the others call him.

Clark swung over the stone window-
rail and slid softly down the knotted
rope through the moonlight, to the
ground. He poised there in the shadow,
gun in hand. No sound broke the sleep-
ing hush.

Now Lurain was following, her black
metal-mesh tunic gleaming in the silver
moon. Mike Shinn and Lieutenant Mor-
row came after, and in a moment they all
stood in the shadow of the looming
palace wall, their pistols glinting in their
hands.

They moved at once toward the rear
of the sleeping palace, stepping sound-
lessly on the stone paving. There seemed
no guards outside the big building.
Neither were there any outside the broad
wooden door of the walled horse-court.
The door creaked, and . they slipped
inside.

There were a score of horses in the
court, and as the strangers entered, the
animals stamped nervously, tossed their
heads suspiciously in the moonlight.
Clark's gaze searched the court desper-
ately. But it was Link Wilson who spot-
ted the saddles and bridles, hanging on
a rail at one side of the court. Quickly
they grasped these and approached the
restless horses.

The horses snorted, stamped, wheeled
away with hoofs ringing loudly on the
paving. Clark cursed inwardly as they
again approached the nervous steeds.
Link Wilson talked to the horses in a
low, soothing monotone as he advanced.
The ex-cowboy was soon saddling one

of them, and Morrow too and also Lurain
had got others to stand still. Clark
noticed that the girl worked as silently
and swiftly as any of the men, her face
showing no particle of fear in the silver
light. His heart warmed again to her
proud, unwavering courage.

He got one of the restive horses by the
mane, and quickly attached the high,
queer saddle and the rude bridle. Quell
also managed to saddle one, but Mike
Shinn and Blacky were having the devil's
own time, hanging onto horses that had
begun to plunge and rear.

"Help Mike, Link," whispered Clark
quickly to the Texan. As the other
obeyed, Clark hurried to aid the gang-
ster, leading his own saddled steed.

"This damned goat has got the devil
himself in him!" whispered Blacky furi-
ously as Clark reached him. "I wish we
had a good eight-cylinder jaloppy for the
getaway, instead of these plugs."

Clark grabbed the saddle from the
gangster and threw it over the plunging,
rearing animal.

"Guards!" cried Lurain suddenly, her
silver voice stabbing.

Clark whirled, still holding the mane
of the plunging horse. Two armored
guards, attracted by the commotion in the
horse-court, stood framed in the half-
opened door, staring. Then with a yell
of alarm, drawing their swords, they
rushed forward.

Black)' Cain's automatic sprang into his
hand, and with a snarl on his lips, the
gangster shot. The reports cracked in
close succession and the two charging
soldiers fell in heaps.

"That ties it!" cried the gangster.
"Now we got to crash our way out!"

"More guards come," called Lurain's
high voice, completely calm and unfear-
ful but urgent, as she snatched up one of
the swords of the fallen men.

The yell of alarm had been repeated

474

WEIRD TALES

near the looming palace, and there was a
clank of running men. Clark Stannard
fought furiously to tie the girths of the
struggling horse. He finally succeeded,
and then he yelled to Blacky Cain.

"Here you are! Mount at once, all of
you!"

Now an uproar was spreading through
the whole pile of the hexagonal palace,
and shouts and clash of arms could be
heard from all around it, converging on
the horse-court.

Clark swung into the saddle. As he
jerked the reins to control the rearing
animal, he saw that outside the horse-
court a scattered body of twenty or
thirty Red guards were rushing forward
with drawn swords gleaming in the
mo»nlight.

"We'll have to break out through
them!" Clark yelled. "Ride!"

And he dug his heels into his steed's
flanks. The nervous animal needed no
further urging, and sprang forward
toward the door with hoofs clanging on
the pavement. Right beside Clark rode
Link Wilson, the Texan sitting easily in
the saddle, the rest thundering after.

Straight into the scattered band of
guards at the door of the court they rode.
Clark glimpsed their drawn swords, then
heard the boom of a gun beside him,
over the din of hoofs and yells. Link
Wilson had drawn one of his forty-fives
and was shooting as they charged. Three
of the guards slumped down as the heavy
slugs hit them.

They crashed th rough the other guards,
a mad whirlwind of riders and steeds,
the soldiers and stabbing swords seem-
ing to spin around them. Then, with the
swiftness of a cinema film, they were
through the soldiers, riding full tilt
around the big palace toward the great
avenue that led to the city wall.

Other guards ran wildly out from the
palace, swords raised in the moonlight.
Clark had his own gun out now and
fired, and heard Link Wilson's -pistol
booming again. He saw Lurain bending
low over her mount's neck and slashing
at a guard whose spear struck toward
her. The man went down and she rode
right over him, and the little band raced
clattering down the wide street of the
awakening city.

"The spawn of K'Lamm cannot stand
against us, Stannar!" cried Lurain's silver,
pealing voice as she rode.

"Yippee!" yelled Link Wilson, the ex-
cowboy, drunk with reckless excitement
as his horse galloped furiously over the
paving.

"The whole city is rousing!" shouted
Lieutenant Morrow, spurring his horse
beside Clark's.

They thundered down that wide dark
street to the accompaniment of mad yells
of rage from behind them, and startled
cries along the street. A few men ran
out as though to intercept them, but re-
coiled abruptly as the desperate little
band rode down on them.

Clanging of hoofs on stone, chorus of
yells and orders, were wild music in
Clark Stannard's ears as he and his men
and the Dordonan girl thundered down
the street of moonlit K'Lamm. He saw
torches flickering and bobbing ahead of
them.

"Look!" yelled Ephraim Quell sud-
denly over the din. "The gates "

"Faster!" cried Clark wildly, as he
saw at what the Yankee skipper pointed.

The great gates in the city wall had
been open, as Clark had guessed. But
now, alarmed by the clamor at the dis-
tant palace, the guards around those gates
were hastily pushing against the mighty
bronze valves, were closing them.

THE LAKE OF LIFE

475

9. Dordotia

IF they close those gates, we're
trapped!" yelled Clark.
They spurred desperately forward.
From the guard-towers on either side of
the gate, several dozen soldiers had run
out and formed a line in front of the
gate. Behind that line, a half-dozen other
Red warriors were slowly forcing the
great valves shut.

"Ride through them!" Clark shouted.
"It's now or never."

They crashed into that solid line of
guards — and stopped! For these soldiers
grabbed their bridles and stirrups and
clung to them, holding them, stabbing at
them with their swords. The crazed
horses whirled and plunged in a mad
inferno of struggle, the riders rising like
swimmers above a wave of armored men
and slashing swords.

Clark felt a blade sear along his fore-
arm, and glimpsed the brutal face of the
Red warrior stabbing at him. His gun
kicked in his hand and the man fell with
his forehead driven in. Clark shot again,
trying to clear away the men clinging to
his bridle. Link Wilson's heavy gun was
booming, while Blacky Cain, his eyes
blazing and a frozen killer mask on his
face, was viciously shooting the men
trying to pull him down.

"Dordona! Dordona!" pealed a silver
cry from the girl Lurain, wielding her
sword with wildcat swiftness and fury.

The gates were almost closed! And
from far back at the palace of Thargo,
masses of soldiers were coming on the
run. Clark had a cold, sinking sense that
they were trapped. Then he heard a
hoarse cry.

"Out of my way, you scum!" Ephraim
Quell shouted, forcing through his at-
tackers, clubbing his reversed gun on
their heads.

Quell broke through them. Clark

saw the bony Yankee skipper break
through on his mount to the half-dozen
men who now had pushed the gates
within a foot of closing. Ephraim Quell's
gun-butt smashed down among them, sent
them reeling, his horse trampling them.
The Yankee leaped from his horse,
swiftly pulled on one of the great valves.

He pulled it open a few yards, by fren-
zied, tremendous effort. But the men he
had scattered were on their feet again,
rushing at him and stabbing with their
swords. Quell reeled back from them.

Clark shouted, his voice ringing over
the mad din, and the others heard and
pushed desperately forward. The horses,
maddened by the struggle to the pitch of
frenzy, surged forward crazily toward
the gate-opening that promised freedom,
trampling down the clinging guards.

Clark's gun blazed the last of its clip,
and the men stabbing at Quell fell. Link
Wilson spurred in, grabbed the Yankee
skipper's horse, helped haul the bony
seaman up onto it. Then before the
guards they had broken through could
reach them again, their horses were bolt-
ing out through the opened gates. Wild
from the battle and unaccustomed gun-
fire, they plunged for freedom, Clark's
and Lurain's steeds jamming momentarily
in the narrow opening.

Then they were all out in the open
moonlight of the plain, the dark walls
and confusion and raging shouts of
K'Lamm behind them. Plunging, racing,
snorting, the horses galloped wildly over
the moonlit sea of grass and brush. The
wild uproar of the Red city receded
swiftly.

"Which way to Dordona?" cried Clark
to Lurain, shouting to her over the rush
of wind.

"We follow the way now," she cried.
"Due east from here it lies — we go to the
river, and along it to my city."

Now the horses were settling to a

476

WEIRD TALES

steady, rushing lope as their frenzy of
panic quieted a little. Clark turned in
the saddle, but there was no sign of pur-
suit as yet from K'Lamra.

But none of them had escaped un-
scathed. Mike Shine had a bleeding cut
on his forehead; Blacky Cain had one
sleeve slashed to ribbons; the rest all had
small cut or stab wounds. Only Ephraim
Quell, riding grimly forward with jacket
buttoned tightly against the wind, ap-
peared to have escaped without injury.

Clark leaned toward the Dordonan
girl riding close beside him. Lurain had
a cut across one bare knee, but it was not
serious. As they galloped, she looked
tautly back to where K'Lamm had
dropped from sight in the moonlight.

"They will try to follow but they can-
not trail us by night, and they dare not
go too close to Dordona in small parties,"
she said. Then she laughed. "I would
like to see Thargo's face now."

Ahead in the dim moonlight there soon
loomed vaguely a long, low line of dark
trees. It marked the river, and they
reached it in a quarter-hour. The dull
roar of the stream was loud, as it raced
with the swiftness of a mountain-flume
toward Dordona.

As they rode along it, heading east, the
first gray streak of dawn showed ahead.
Clark's hopes were soaring. Every beat
of the hoofs brought them nearer to Dor-
dona, where lay the pit that was entrance
to the Lake of Life. He'd yet succeed in
reaching it — lie had the girl's word now
that he could descend to it.

Ephraim quell suddenly toppled
stiffly from his horse. They reined in
hastily and Clark ran to the Yankee's
side. Quell' s bony face was a ghastly,
stiff mask, his eyes closed. From under
his coat welled a dark stain, and when
Clark ripped the coat open, he saw that

beneath it had been concealed two deep
sword-wounds.

"Good God! Quell was badly wounded
when he kept the gate from closing, but
he said nothing to us!" Clark exclaimed.

Ephraim Quell s glazed eyes nickered
at Clark's drawn, tense countenance. A
smile glimmered in them.

"I'm — 'bout ready to cast anchor,"
Quell muttered. "Felt the life running
out of me, as I rode "

"Quell, you're not dying!" Clark said
desperately. "We'll get you to Dordona,
and pull you through."

"No, I'm done for," whispered the sea-
man. "And — I don't mind. Ever since
my ship burned and they took my certifi-
cate, I — haven't cared much about liv-
ing."

His glazed eyes fixed on the eastern
sky, pale with dawn. A cool breeze had
begun to blow from there, stirring the
grass. The Yankee skipper's lips moved,
almost inaudibly.

"Fair skies and a good wind — to-
day " he whispered. Then his head

lolled laxly, his eyes dull, dead.

Clark let him down and got to his feet.
There was a hard lump in his throat but
he made his voice harsh.

"Mike — Blacky — keep a watch to the
south and west. Link and Morrow and I
will bury him."

In the paling dawn, they scooped a
grave under a tree beside the roaring
river, using a little camp-spade from one
of the packs. White mists of morning
made everything unreal as they put Ephra-
im Quell's stiff body into the shallow
grave, and covered it.

"Mount! Forward!" Clark ordered.

Again they galloped, hoofs thudding
above the river roar, bearing them on
through swirling white mists.

"I'm kind of glad," said Link Wilson's
drawling voice finally, "that we buried
him where he can hear water."

THE LAKE OF LIFE

477

"Yeah," muttered Mike Shinn. "Quell
was a good guy. He was a great guy."

An hour later, Lurain suddenly reined
in her horse and pointed eagerly ahead.

"There is Dordona!"

Five miles ahead rose the eastern wall
of the great crater, the mighty, looming
barrier of the mountains. Close under the
frowning cliffs brooded ancient, crum-
bling Dordona. Blade, silent, brooding
like a withered ancient who has long ago
fallen from greatness, it lay in the chill
white mists, strange contrast to the city
from which they had come.

Behind the black battlements of an en-
circling wall whose top had crumbled at
places, rose a mass of antique towers and
roofs of dull black stone, weathered by
the winds and rains of ages. Under a
water-gate in the dilapidated wall ran the
roaring, mill-race river they had fol-
lowed. It ran straight toward a building
at the center of the city, a huge black
dome that towered two hundred feet into
the air.

The gates in the black wall were
pushed open as they approached. Soldiers
in black armor waved their swords in the
air and yelled joyful greetings to Lurain,
riding now at the head of the little troop.
And as they rode on into the city, from
somber, crumbling buildings poured men
and women with shouts of gladness.

"Lurain! The princess Lurain has re-
turned!" they shouted.

Clark Stannard, looking about keenly,
saw that indeed Dordona had long passed
the zenith of its glory. Many of the black
stone buildings were untenanted, falling
to ruins. Green grass grew between the
blocks of black paving in the streets.

And the people pouring forth were not
nearly so numerous as the Reds, he saw.
Clark sensed despair under their momen-
tary joy, read hopelessness on their pale
faces, the hopelessness of great fear.

"Say, we'll be the white-haired boys in

this joint for bringing back the girl,"
Mike Shinn said happily.

"There aren't enough men here to de-
fend this city properly," Lieutenant Mor-
row told Clark keenly. "The place is too
big now for its population, and the wall
hasn't been kept up."

Clark nodded grimly. "From what
Thargo said, the population of this place
has been steadily dwindling for a long
time."

"We go to the Temple of the Shaft,"
Lurain called to Clark. "My father, the
lord Kimor, will be there."

They rode after her toward the huge,
black-domed temple that brooded at the
center of die city. It loomed massively in
front of them, incomparably the largest
and most ancient building they had seen
in this land. For it was old, the stone
paving in front of it worn deep by ages
of tramping feet, its slot-windows crum-
bling at the edges.

Guards took their horses, and swung
open the high bronze doors of the
temple. Lurain led the way inside, her
slim, boyish figure striding with her
sheathed sword rattling on the stone floor.
Clark and his men, following her inside,
paused for a moment, thunderstruck.

The interior of the temple was one co-
lossal room, dim and dusky and vast, its
only illumination shafts of sunlight from
the slot-like windows. And it was throb-
bing and quivering to a thunder of bel-
lowing sound that was deafening, an un-
broken, tremendous roar of waters.

The racing river from outside ran right
into the temple, through a gap in one
wall. The waters rushed with blinding
speed across the floor of the vast room, in
a deep, wide canal, toward a round, black
opening a hundred feet across that
yawned at the center of the floor. Into
this gaping abyss, the river tumbled with
a reverberating thunder.

478

WEIRD TALES

Clark and his men moved nearer the
pit, stood on the very edge of the abyss.
He peered down into an impenetrable
darkness that seemed to go down to the
bowels of the earth. He could make out
that the vertical sides of the pit were of
rough rock, in which had been carved the
steps of a narrow, spiraling stair. The
head of this stair was closed by a barred
gate guarded by Black warriors. And the
raging cataract of waters, leaping out over
the edge of the pit, tumbled down its
center in a tremendous waterfall, drop-
ping into the dark.

"Good God! this must be the way
down to the cavern far below — to the
Lake of Life!" exclaimed Clark, stupefi-
edly.

"Say, I don't hanker to go down
there," said Mike Shinn, awed. "It looks
to me like the doorway down to purga-
tory."

Lurain was coming around the edge of
the pit now, bringing with her a half-
dozen Dordonan men in black armor.

"My father, Stannar!" she said.

Clark turned to confront Kimor, the
ruler of Dordona.

Kimor was sixty years old, at least, a
tall, arrow- straight, superbly muscled man
with white hair and pointed white beard,
and fierce, shaggy white eyebrows over
keen, watchful blue eyes.

"Strangers, you are welcome!" he told
Clark. "My daughter has told me how
you helped her escape K'Lamm and bring
us warning of the attack which Thargo
plans for three days hence. We expected
no attack for weeks — there is hardly time
to prepare.

"We of Dordona will be grateful for
your help in the coming battle," Kimor
continued. "Lurain informs me you are
from outside the mountains, and bear
weapons of great and strange power.
You can aid us much, and any reward we
can give you will be yours."

"Why, we ask but one reward," Clark
said, looking puzzledly at Lurain. "It is
what I told your daughter — that we be
allowed to go down that stair in the pit to
the Lake of Life, and bring back a flask
of its waters. For that reward, we have
joined you."

Kimor's fierce face turned dead-white
as he heard. His eyes blazed fire of out-
raged, fanatical fury, and he ripped out
his sword from its sheath. And from the
Dordonans behind him came wrathful,
raging cries as they too drew their weap-
ons, their faces contorted.

"You ask that?" thundered Kimor to
Clark. "You ask leave from us to commit
the supreme sacrilege that no man may
commit and live? Your very request is a
sacrilege to this Temple of the Shaft!
Nobles of Dordona, kill these men for
their blasphemy!"

10. Down the Stair

Blacky cain's gun leaped into his
hands, and the others followed his
example swiftly as the Dordonan warri-
ors leaped forward with upraised swords,
wild wrath on their faces.

"Don't shoot!" Clark yelled tensely.
For Lurain had sprung in front of the
charging nobles and her fanatical father,
halting them with an urgent gesture.

"Wait!" she cried. "These are stran-
gers from outside our land — they do not
know that it is blasphemy they speak.
They will not ask for such a thing when
they understand that it is a sacrilege."

"So this," Clark grated to the girl, "is
how you keep the bargain you made with
me!"

"I do not understand you, stranger,"
she said coldly, and turned back to Ki-
mor. "You will forgive their ignorance,
father?"

"They should be slain for such blas-
phemy," said Kimor fiercely. But slowly,

THE LAKE OF LIFE

479

reluctantly, he sheathed his sword, and
said, "They are forgiven because they are
strangers who know not the law. But let
them repeat their blasphemy, let them
even but glance at the sacred shaft, and it
shall mean their deaths."

"Looks like the girl's double-crossed
us," rasped Blacky Cain. "Shall we try to
crash our way down into that pit? It
looks like suicide to me to go down that
damned stair, but we'll do it if you say."

"Put away your guns," Clark said
quickly to the gangster and the others.
"There are too many of them here for
us, and the whole city would come run-
ning. Later on, we may be able to enter
the pit."

Then he turned back to Kimor and Lu-
rain. The girl showed no sign of emotion
as she met his bitterly accusing gaze.

"We withdraw our request, since it is
against your law," Clark told the fierce
old Dordonan ruler.

"Well that you do," said Kimor grim-
ly, "for I tell you no man for ages has
been permitted to enter the sacred shaft."

He continued, "You shall be given a
dwelling for your use, and food and
wine. If you wish to help us against the
Reds, your help is welcome. But whether
you help or not, you cannot go near this
pit. You are forbidden from now on to
enter this temple, under pain of death."

"We understand," Clark said tightly.
His gaze again sought Lurain's face,
charged with his bitter scorn.

Two of the black-armored warriors, at
Kimor' s command, led Clark and his men
out of the temple. They conducted them
along the crumbling streets, whose occu-
pants watched the strangers curiously.

Clark's thoughts were bitter. Lurain
had tricked him neatly — had had no in-
tention of fulfilling the promise she had
made him. They were here in Dordona,
but as far from the shining lake as ever.

The two Dordonan guides left them

outside a weathered, one-story building
of black stone, with a promise that food
and drink would be brought them. The
interior of the building, they found when
they entered, was one of dark, gloomy
rooms, its furniture and floor covered
with dust, everything here exuding an-
tiquity.

"Just as lief bed down in a mauso-
leum!" grunted Mike Shinn in disgust as
he tossed his pack into a corner and sat
down.

"What," Lieutenant Morrow asked
Clark keenly, "are we going to do now?"

"We're going to get into that pit,
somehow, by force or stealth," Clark de-
clared. "We'll wait until tonight, steal
into the temple, and overpower the
guards at the head of the stair. Then we
can get down the shaft, and I think
they're too superstitious to pursue us."

"But they'll be waitin' for us when
we come back up," reminded Link Wil-
son. "That is, if we do come back up."

"It will be up to us then to fight our
way through them," Clark said grimly.
He added bitterly, "Lurain broke her bar-
gain with us; so our promise to help them
in the coming war no longer holds. If
we get back up with the flask of water
from the lake, we'll get out of Dordona
as soon as we can."

The day passed slowly. Clark Stan-
nard and his men went out into the
streets of the crumbling black city for a
time. Apparently they sauntered idly, but
in reality were mapping a route to the
temple, one that they could follow with
less chance of being observed. He noticed
the Dordonan people now shunned them,
looking at them in half -veiled hate.
News of their blasphemy had apparently
spread in the city.

Night fell, and Clark watched the
moon rise over the ancient city. Then
after some hours had passed, he led the

480

WEIRD TALES

others into the dark back rooms of their
dwelling, intending to slip out that way.
But as he entered the darkness there, he
glimpsed a moving figure in the black-
ness. Instantly he leaped at the other,
grasped him by the throat.

"It's a spy!" he grated. "If they've
found out what we're planning, we're
sunk." And he rasped in the language of
Dordona to his prisoner, "One shout and
you die."

"Release me — I will not shout,"
gasped a voice.

'Xurain!" he exclaimed. "What in the
world "

He dragged the girl over to one of the
windows, where the moonlight illumi-
nated her white, strange face and distend-
ed eyes.

"What are you doing, spying on us?"
Clark demanded, his face hardening as he
remembered.

"No, I came to fulfill the promise I
made you, to lead you down to the holy
lake!" she gasped. Her words poured
forth in a torrent as Clark stood in
stunned surprize. "Stannar, why did you
tell my father Kimor you wished to de-
scend to the lake? That was madness!"

"But you had promised me that you
would see that I got down the shaft,"
Clark said bewilderedly.

"You do not understand," Lurain told
him. "I made that promise, yes — but
what I meant was that I would secretly
take you down the shaft; for if my father
knew of it he would slay us instantly for
the sacrilege — yes, even me, his daughter.
I thought you understood that and would
be silent about the lake until I could ful-
fill my promise."

"Lord,' I've misjudged you, Lurain,"
Clark told her impulsively. "Come to
think of it, it was rather asinine of me to
blurt out my whole business without mak-
ing sure how things stood. But I hadn't

had time to think, I guess, in the rush of
our escape."

"And I had to pretend ignorance when
you reproached me," she said. "But I have
come now, Stannar. I shall fulfill my
promise and take you down to the cavern
of the Lake of Life. The sin will be on
my head, not on my father and people.
And my sin will be expiated, for surely
the Guardians will slay us down there for
our sacrilege."

She was trembling violently, though
her voice was steady. Clark Stannard
stared at her, frowning.

"You believe that? — believe we're both
going to die down there, Lurain? And
yet you're willing to keep your promise?"

"Yes," the girl told him. "I gave you
my word, and you brought warning to
Dordona as you promised. My death mat-
ters not."

Clark suddenly put his arms around
her, and as he held her quivering figure
he could feel the pounding of her heart.

"Lurain, you're not going to die —
neither of us will die," he told her reas-
suringly. "There are no Guardians down
there — that is legend only. Even if they
were there, I have my weapon."

She said nothing, but he knew she was
convinced of the futility of all human
weapons against those mysterious ward-
ers. He turned to his four men, who had
listened tensely in the dark room.

"You'll stay here," Clark told them.
"I should be back by morning with the
waters from the lake, if all goes well."

"Why don't we go with you?" Blacky
demanded.

But when Lurain understood the ques-
tion, she shook her head. "No, I prom-
ised but to take you, Stannar. Your men
would only be destroyed down there as
we will be, and their help will be needed
here when Thargo comes to attack Dor-
dona."

"Remember, you're bound by my

W. T.— 6

promise to help these Blacks against
Thargo," Clark told his men, "whether
or not I return."

Then Clark brought from his pack the
leaden flask he had brought so far, along
such a dangerous trail in preparation for
this time. He paused then for a moment,
before the silent quartet.

"Good luck, boys, if I don't come
back," he said.

"The same to you, chief, and it's me
thinks you're going to need it," muttered
Mike Shinn, as they shook hands.

"We go out the back of this dwelling,"
whispered Lurain, to Clark. "Follow me
— and be very silent."

He emerged with her into the check-
ered moonlight and shadow of one of
Dordona's silent streets. The girl, he saw
now, carried a short, pointed metal bar.
She led by deserted alleys of crumbling
ruins, not toward the great temple, but
toward a ruined, deserted stone building
a quartcr-milc from the great dome.

CLARK followed her wondcringly into
the ruin. She led across a room
strewn with debris of crumbling stone,
and knelt on die corner of the stone floor.
He knelt puzzledly beside her, turning
his tiny flashlight beam on the weathered
blocks of die floor.

"Dig out these blocks," whispered Lu-
rain, pointing to the floor. "I will hold
the light."

"But I don't " Clark began, then

halted and obeyed. It was evident diat
Lurain knew what she was about.

With the metal bar she had brought, he
soon dug out four of die big blocks.
There was revealed beneath them a dark,
burrow-like opening in the earth, the
mouth of a horizontal underground pas-
sage. Lurain dropped quickly down into
diis, and Clark followed. Turning his
beam, he discovered the passage was
W. T.— 7

shoulder-high, extending away through
die solid rock.

"This passage," Lurain whispered,
"was dug secretly many generations ago,
by plotters in the city who wished to
readi the pit and go down the stairs to
the Lake of Life. They were of the rebels
of diat time who finally left Dordona to
found the city K'Larpm. They could not
enter the pit from the temple, for die
stair-head there is always guarded, as you
saw. So they dug this passage, opening
into the pit below.

"Just as they finished their sacrilegious
work," she continued, "their plot was de-
tected. They were slain before they could
make use of the passage, and it was
blocked up and its existence kept secret.
But the rulers of Dordona have known
of it, and as daughter of the present ruler
I knew of it. It is the one way we can
enter the pit, for if we tried to enter it in
the temple, die guards there would kill
us at once."

Clark's hopes bounded. "Let's get on,
then."

He led the way, flashing his beam
ahead. As they advanced in the passage,
they heard a dull roar that became louder
and louder. Clark knew it was the sound
of the cataract falling into the sacred
shaft, and his excitement increased. Lu-
rain, pressing on behind him, was shiver-
ing.

They reached the end of the passage.
They crouched, petrified by the stupefy-
ing view ahead. The opening in which
they crouched was twenty feet below the
floor of the temple, in the rock side of the
stupendous pit. Right below and outside
diis opening lay the narrow steps of the
spiraling stone stair.

Out there in the pit, not ten yards from
them, there gleamed in the faint light
from above the falling waters of the thun-
dering cataract, the river from far away
that tumbled headlong down into this un-

482

WEIRD TALES

guessable abyss. Its roar seemed to shat-
ter their ears, and its flying spray was cold
on their white faces.

Clark gripped his nerves and crawled
out onto the stone steps. The steps were
not four feet wide, grown with the
slimy green moss of ages, drenched and
dripping with spray. Looking up, he
could just glimpse the moonlit interior
of the great temple, could just see the
heads of the armored guards on duty at
the head of the stair.

Looking down, he could see nothing —
nothing but an unplumbed abyss of dark-
ness into which the waters tumbled, and
round whose side dropped the coils of the
spiral stair. Clark's nerves shrank, ap-
palled for the moment from the thought
of venturing down into that enigmatic
gulf, along that slippery, ancient way.
Then his jaw set in renewed resolution.
Below lay what he had come so far to
seek.

"Lurain, we go downward now," he
told the girl, raising his voice over the
roar. "Would you rather wait here?"

"No, Stannar — I go with you," she
cried. "My promise was to lead you to
the lake itself."

Cautiously, every nerve strung taut,
Clark stepped downward, feeling with
his foot for the next step. He dared not
use the flashlight here, so near the sur-
face. The wet, mossy stone was slippery
under his feet, threatening to send him
slipping and sliding off the unrailed stair.
Sick dizziness swept him as he visualized
himself plunging downward, racing those
tumbling waters in a nightmare fall.

Now he and Lurain had followed the
spiral stair twice around the falling cata-
ract, were deeper below the surface. They
were in almost complete darkness. Spray
stung their cheeks, gusty air-currents
howled up the great shaft, the thunder of
the falling waters beside them was brain-
numbing. Still down and down they
crept, feeling for each slippery step, grop-
ing down through somber, eternal night
toward the mystic Lake of Life and its
legended warders.

You will not want to miss the thrilling chapters
that bring this story to its close in next
month's Weird Tales. Reserve
your copy at your mag-
azine dealer's
now.

v>olgotha Dancers

By MANLY WADE WELLMAN

A curious and terrifying story about an artist who sold his soul that he
might paint a living picture

I HAD come to the Art Museum to
see the special show of Goya prints,
but that particular gallery was so
crowded that I could hardly get in, mudi
less see or savor anything; wherefore I
walked out again. I wandered through
the other wings with their rows and rows
of oils, their Greek and Roman sculp-
tures, their stern ranks of medieval ar-
mors, their Oriental porcelains, their Egyp-
tian gods. At length, by chance and not
by design, I came to the head of a certain
rear stairway. Other habitues of the mu-
seum will know the one I mean when I
remind them that Arnold Bocklin's The
Isle of the Dead hangs on the wall of the
landing.

I started down, relishing in advance
the impression Bocklin's picture would
make with its high brown rocks and black
poplars, its midnight sky and gloomy
film of sea, its single white figure erect
in the bow of the beach-nosing skiff.
But, as I descended, I saw that The Isle
of the Dead was not in its accustomed
position on the wall. In that space, ar-
resting even in the bad light and from
the up-angle of the stairs, hung a gilt-
framed painting I had never seen or
heard of in all my museum-haunting
years.

I gazed at it, one will imagine, all the
way down to the landing. Then I had a
close, searching look, and a final apprais-
ing stare from the lip of the landing
above the lower half of the flight. So far
as I can learn — and I have been diligent
in my research — the thing is unknown

even to the best-informed of art experts.
Perhaps it is as well that I describe it in
detail.

It seemed to represent action upon a
small plateau or table rock, drab and
bare, with a twilight sky deepening into
a starless evening. This setting, restrain-
edly worked up in blue-grays and blue-
blacks, was not the first thing to catch the
eye, however. The front of the picture
was filled with lively dancing creatures,
as pink, plump and naked as cherubs
and as patently evil as the meditations of
Satan in his rare idle moments.

I counted those dancers. There were
twelve of them, ranged in a half-circle,
and they were cavorting in evident glee
around a central object — a prone cross,
which appeared to be made of two stout
logs with some of the bark still upon
them. To this cross a pair of the pink
things — that makes fourteen — kneeling
and swinging blocky-looking hammers or
mauls, spiked a human figure.

I say human when I speak of that fig-
ure, and I withhold the word in describ-
ing the dancers and their hammer-wield-
ing fellows. There is a reason. The su-
pine victim on the cross was a beautifully
represented male body, as clear and anat-
omically correct as an illustration in a sur-
gical textbook. The head was writhed
around, as if in pain, and I could not
see the face or its expression; but in the
tortured tenseness of the muscles, in the
slaty white sheen of the skin with jagged
streaks of vivid gore upon it, agonized
nature was plain and doubly plain. I

483

484

WEIRD TALES

could almost see the painted limbs writhe
against the transfixing nails.

By the same token, the dancers and
hammerers were so dynamically done as
to seem half in motion before my eyes.
So much* for the sound skill of the
painter. Yet, where the crucified prisoner
was all clarity, these others were all fog.
No lines, no angles, no muscles — their
features could not be seen or sensed. I
was not even sure if they had hair or not.
It was as if each was picked out with a ray
of light in that surrounding dusk, light
that revealed and yet shimmered indis-
tinctly; light, too, that had absolutely
nothing of comfort or honesty in it.

"T Told on, there. 1 " came a sharp chal-
-TjL lenge from the stairs behind and
below me. "What are you doing? And
what's that picture doing?"

I started so that I almost lost my foot-
ing and fell upon the speaker — one of
the Museum guards. He was a slight old
fellow and his thin hair was gray, but he
advanced upon me with all the righteous,
angry pluck of a beefy policeman. His
attitude surprized and nettled me.

"I was going to ask somebody that
same question." I told him as austerely as
I could manage. "What about this pic-
ture? I thought there was a Bocklin hang-
ing here."

The guard relaxed his forbidding at-
titude at first sound of my voice. "Oh, I
beg your pardon, sir. I thought you were
somebody else — the man who brought
that thing." He nodded at the picture,
and the hostile glare came back into his
eyes. "It so happened that he talked to
me first, then to the curator. Said it was
art — great art — and the Museum must
have it." He lifted his shoulders, in a
shrug or a shudder. "Personally, I think
it's plain beastly."

So it was, I grew aware as I looked at

it again. "And the Museum has accepted
it at last?" I prompted.

He shook his head. "Oh, no, sir. An
hour ago he was at the back door, with
that nasty daub there under his arm. I
heard part of the argument. He got in-
sulting, and he was told to clear out and
take his picture with him. But he must
have got in here somehow, and hung it
himself." Walking close to the painting,
as gingerly as though he expected the
pink dancers to leap out at him, he
pointed to the lower edge of the frame.
"If it was a real Museum piece, we'd
have a plate right there, with the name
of the painter and the title."

I, too, came close. There was no plate,
just as the guard had said. But in the
lower left-hand corner of the canvas were
sprawling capitals, pale paint on the dark,
spelling out the word GOLGOTHA. Be-
neath these, in small, barely readable
script:

/ sold my soul that I might paint a
living picture.

No signature or other clue to the ar-
tist's identity.

The guard had discovered a great
framed rectangle against the wall to one
side. "Here's the picture he took down,"
he informed me, highly relieved. "Help
me put it back, will you, sir? And do
you suppose," here he grew almost wist-
ful, "that we could get rid of this other
thing before someone finds I let the crazy
fool slip past me?"

I took one edge of The Isle of the
Dead and lifted it to help him hang it
once more.

"Tell you what," I offered on sudden
impulse; "I'll take this Golgotha piece
home with me, if you like."

"Would you do that?" he almost
yelled out in his joy at the suggestion.
"Would you, to oblige me?"

"To oblige myself," I returned. "I
need another picture at my place."

And the upshot of it was, he smug-
gled me and the unwanted painting out
of the Museum. Never mind how. I
have done quite enough as it is to jeop-
ardize his job and my own welcome up
there.

IT was not until I had paid off my taxi
and lugged the unwieldy parallelo-
gram of canvas and wood upstairs to my
bachelor apartment that I bothered to
wonder if it might be valuable. I never
did find out, but from the first I was
deeply impressed.

Hung over my own fireplace, it looked
as large and living as a scene glimpsed
through a window or, perhaps, on a stage
in a theater. The capering pink bodies
caught new lights from my lamp, lights
that glossed and intensified their shape
and color but did not reveal any new de-
tails. I pored once more over the cryptic
legend: / sold my soul that I might paint
a living picture.

A living picture — was it that? I could
not answer. For all my honest delight in
sudi things, I cannot be called expert or
even knowing as regards art. Did I even
like the Golgotha painting? I could not
be sure of that, cither. And the rest of
the inscription, about selling a soul; I
was considerably intrigued by that, and
let my thoughts ramble on the subject of
Satanist complexes and the vagaries of
half-crazy painters. As I read, that eve-
ning, I glanced up again and again at my
new possession. Sometimes it seemed ri-
diculous, sometimes sinister. Shortly after
midnight I rose, gazed once more, and
then turned out the parlor lamp. For a
moment, or so it seemed, I could see
those dancers, so many dim-pink silhou-
ettes in the sudden darkness. I went to
the kitchen for a bit of whisky and water,
and thence to my bedroom.

I had dreams. In them I was a boy
again, and my mother and sister were

leaving the house to go to a theater where
— think of it! — Richafd Mansfield would
play Beau Brummell. I, the youngest, was
told to stay at home and mind the troub-
lesome furnace. I wept copiously in my
disappointed loneliness, and then Mans-
field himself stalked in, in full Brum-
mell regalia. He laughed goldenly and
stretched out his hand in warm greeting.
I, the lad of my dreams, put out my own
hand, then was frightened when he
would not loosen his grasp. I tugged,
and he laughed again. The gold of his
laughter turned suddenly hard, cold. I
tugged with all my strength, and woke.

Something held me tight by the wrist.

In my first half-moment of wakeful-
ness I was aware that the room was filled
with the pink dancers of the picture, in
nimble, fierce-happy motion. They were
man-size, too, or nearly so, visible in the
dark with the dim radiance of fox-fire.
On the small scale of the painting they
had seemed no more than babyishly
plump; now they were gross, like huge
erect toads. And, as I awakened fully,
they were closing in, a menacing ring of
them, around my bed. One stood at my
right side, and its grip, clumsy and rub-
bery-hard like that of a monkey, was
closed upon my arm.

I saw and sensed all this, as I say, in a
single moment. With the sensing came
the realization of peril, so great that I
did not stop to wonder at the uncanniness
of my visitors. 1 tried frantically to jerk
loose. For the moment I did not succeed
and as I thrashed about, throwing my
body nearly across the bed, a second
dancer dashed in from the left. It seized
and clamped my other arm. I felt, rather
than heard, a wave of soft, wordless mer-
riment from them all. My heart and sin-
ews seemed to fail, and briefly I lay still
in a daze of horror, pinned down cruci-
fix-fashion between my two captors.

486

WEIRD TALES

Was that a hammer raised above me as
I sprawled?

There rushed and swelled into me the
sudden startled strength that sometimes
favors the desperate. I screamed like any
wild tiling caught in a trap, rolled some-
how out of bed and to my feet. One of
the beings I shook off and the other I
dashed against the bureau. Freed, I made
for the bedroom door and the front of
the apartment, stumbling and staggering
on fear-weakened legs.

One of the dim-shining pink things
barred my way at the very threshold, and
the others were closing in behind, as if
for a sudden rush. I flung my right fist
with all my strength and weight. The
being bobbed back unresistingly before
my smash, like a rubber toy floating
through water. I plunged past, reached
the entry and fumbled for the knob of
the outer door.

They were all about me then, their
rubber}' palms fumbling at my shoulders,
my elbows, my pa jama jacket. They
would have dragged me down before I
could negotiate the lock. A racking shud-
der possessed me and seemed to flick
them clear. Then I stumbled against a
stand, and purely by good luck my hand
fell upon a bamboo walking-stick. I
yelled again, in truly hysterical fierceness,
and laid about me as with a whip. My
blows did little or no damage to those
unearthly assailants, but they shrank back,
teetering and dancing, to a safe distance.
Again I had the sense that they were
laughing, mocking. For the moment I
had beaten them off, but they were sure
of me in the end. Just then my groping
free hand pressed a switch. The entry
sprang into light.

On the instant they were not there.

Somebody was knocking outside, and
with trembling fingers I turned the
knob of the door. In came a tall, slender

girl with a blue lounging-robe caught
hurriedly around her. Her bright hair
was disordered as though she had just
sprung from her bed.

"Is someone sick?" she asked in a
breathless voice. "I live down the hall —
I heard cries." Her round blue eyes were
studying my face, which must have been
ghastly pale. "You see, I'm a trained
nurse, and perhaps "

"Thank God you did come!" I broke
in, unceremoniously but honestly, and
went before her to turn on every lamp in
the parlor.

It was she who, without guidance,
searched out my whisky and siphon and
mixed for me a highball of grateful
strength. My teeth rang nervously on the
edge of the glass as I gulped it down.
After that I got my own robe — a becom-
ing one, with satin facings — and sat with
her on the divan to tell of my adventure.
When I had finished, she gazed long at
the painting of the dancers, then back at
me. Her eyes, like two chips of the April
sky, were full of concern and she held
her rosy lower lip between her teeth. I
thought that she was wonderfully pretty.

"What a perfectly terrible nightmare!"
she said.

"It was no nightmare," I protested.

She smiled and argued the point, tell-
ing me all manner of comforting things
about mental associations and their re-
flections in vivid dreams.

To clinch her point she turned to the
painting.

"This line about a 'living picture' is
the peg on which your slumbering mind
hung the whole fabric," she suggested,
her slender fingertip touching the painted
scribble. "Your very literal subconscious
self didn't understand that the artist
meant his picture would live only figura-
tively."

"Are you sure that's what the artist
meant?" I asked, but finally I let her con-

THE GOLGOTHA DANCERS

vince me. One can imagine how badly I
wanted to be convinced.

She mixed mc another highball, and a
short one for herself. Over it she told me
her name- Miss Dolby — and finally she
left me with a last comforting assurance.
But, nightmare or no, I did not sleep
again that night. I sat in the parlor
among the lamps, smoking and dipping
into book after book. Countless times I
felt my gaze drawn back to the painting
over the fireplace, with the cross and the
nail-pierced wretch and the shimmering
pink dancers.

After the rising sun had filled the
apartment with its honest light and cheer
I felt considerably calmer. I slept all
morning, and in the afternoon was dis-
posed to agree with Miss Dolby that the
whole business had been a bad dream,
nothing more. Dressing, I went down
the hall, knocked on her door and invited
her to dinner with me.

It was a good dinner. Afterward we
went to an amusing motion picture, with
Charles Butterworth in it as I remember.
After bidding her good-night, I went to
my own place. Undressed and in bed, I
lay awake. My late morning slumber
made my eyes slow to close. Thus it was
that I heard the faint shuffle of feet and,
sitting up against my pillows, saw the
glowing silhouettes of the Golgotha
dancers. Alive and magnified, they were
creeping into my bedroom.

I did not hesitate or shrink this time.
I sprang up, tense and defiant.

"No, you don't!" I yelled at them. As
they seemed to hesitate before the impact
of my wild voice, I charged frantically.
For a moment I scattered them and got
through the bedroom door, as on the pre-
vious night. There was another shindy
in the entry; this time they all got hold
of me, like a pack of hounds, and wres-
tled me back against the wall. I writhe
even now when I think of the unearthly

hardness of their little gripping paws.
Two on each arm were spread-eagling me
upon the plaster. The cruciform position
again!

I swore, yelled and kicked. One of
them was in the way of my foot. He
floated back, unhurt. That was their
strength and horror — their ability to go
flabby and non-resistant under smashing,
flattening blows. Something tickled my
palm, pricked it. The point of a
spike. . . .

"Miss Dolby!" I shrieked, as a child
might call for its mother. "Help! Miss
D "

The door flew open; I must not have
locked it. "Here I am," came her un-
afraid reply.

She was outlined against the rectangle
of light from the hall. My assailants let
go of me to dance toward her. She
gasped but did not scream. I staggered
along the wall, touched a light-switch,
and the parlor just beyond us flared into
visibility. Miss Dolby and I ran in to the
lamp, rallying there as stone-age folk
must have rallied at their fire to face the
monsters of the night. I looked at her;
she was still fully dressed, as I had left
her, apparently had been sitting up. Her
rouge made flat patches on her pale
cheeks, but her eyes were level.

This time the dancers did not retreat
or vanish; they lurked in the com-
parative gloom of the entry, jigging and
trembling as if mustering their powers
and resolutions for another rush at us.

"You see," I chattered out to her, "it
wasn't a nightmare."

She spoke, not in reply, but as if to
herself. "They have no faces," she whis-
pered. "No faces!" In the half-light
that was diffused upon them from our
lamp they presented the featurelessness of
so many huge gingerbread boys, covered
with pink icing. One of them, some kind

488

WEIRD TALES

of leader, pressed forward within the
circle of the light. It daunted him a bit.
He hesitated, but did not retreat.

From my center table Miss Dolby had
picked up a bright paper-cutter. She
poised it with the assurance of one who
knows how to handle cutting instruments.

"When they come," she said steadily,
"let's stand close together. We'll be
harder to drag down that way."

I wanted to shout my admiration of
her fearless front toward the dreadful be-
ings, my thankfulness for her quick run
to my rescue. All I could mumble was,
"You're might)' brave."

She turned for a moment to look at the
picture above my dying fire. My eyes fol-
lowed hers. I think I expected to see a
blank canvas — find that the painted
dancers had vanished from it and had
grown into die living ones. But they
were still in the picture, and the cross
and the victim were there, too. Miss
Dolby read aloud the inscription:

"A living picture . . . The artist knew
what he was talking about, after all."

"Couldn't a living picture be killed?"
I wondered.

It sounded uncertain, and a childish
quibble to boot, but Miss Dolby ex-
claimed triumphantly, as at an inspira-
tion.

"Killed? Yes!" she shouted. She
sprang at the picture, darting out with
the paper-cutter. The point ripped into
one of the central figures in the dancing
semicircle.

All the crowd in the entry seemed to
give a concerted throb, as of startled pro-
test. I swung, heart racing, to front them
again. What had happened? Something
had changed, I saw. The intrepid leader
had vanished. No, he had not drawn
back into the group. He had vanished.

Miss Dolby, too, had seen. She struck
again, gashed the painted representation
of another dancer. And this time the

vanishing happened before my eyes, a
creature at the rear of the group went out
of existence as suddenly and completely
as though a light had blinked out.

The others, driven by their danger,
rushed.

I met them, feet planted. I tried to
embrace them all at once, went over back-
ward under them. I struck, wrenched,
tore. I think I even bit something grisly
and bloodless, like fungoid tissue, but I
refuse to remember for certain. One or
two of the forms struggled past me and
grappled Miss Dolby. I struggled to my
feet and pulled them back from her.
There were not so many swarming after
me now. I fought hard before they got
me down again. And Miss Dolby kept
tearing and stabbing at the canvas —
again, again. Clutches melted from my
throat, my arms. There were only two
dancers left. I flung them back and rose.
Only one left. Then none.

They were gone, gone into nowhere.

"That did it," said Miss Dolby breath-
lessly.

She had pulled the picture down. It
was only a frame now, with ragged rib-
bons of canvas dangling from it.

I snatched it out of her hands and
threw it upon the coals of the fire.

"Look," I urged her joyfully. "It's
burning! That's the end. Do you see?"

"Yes, I see," she answered slowly.
"Some fiend-ridden artist — his evil ge-
nius brought it to life."

"The inscription is the literal truth,
then?" 1 supplied.

"Truth no more." She bent to watch
the burning. "As the painted figures
were destroyed, their incarnations faded."

We said nothing further, but sat down
together and gazed as the flames ate the
last thread of fabric, the last splinter of
wood. Finally we looked up again and
smiled at each other.

All at once I knew that I loved her.

By H. W. GUERNSEY

An ironic little story about a practical communist who taught his
friend when to take him seriously

CHAUNCEY knocked the dottle
out of his corncob and briefly
startled Old Shep by inquiring
unemotionally, "Will you never finish
that blasted stick?"

Which in Old Chauncey was tanta-
mount to fury. Words being precious
things, both old boys hoarded every
syllable; Shep tightened his leathery lips
and with the scalpel-point of the knife
flicked away a mote of pine. Each link of
the chain he was whittling from that in-
terminable stick of soft pine resembled
ivoty in its satin finish. He might produce
one link in a day or let it require a full
week. No hurry. The current chain num-
bered four hundred and seventy-two
links. A masterpiece.

Under Shep's surreptitious scrutiny,
Old Chauncey stood erect purposefully
and stalked to the woodpile. There a fat
log stood on end. With one swift, seem-
ingly effortless stroke of the ax he cleft
the log in two, spat explosively and
hiked into the house wagging his jaw.

The log-built house, a jewel of consci-
entious carpentry, stood on the wooded
elevation called St. Paul's Hill, near
town. On the side hill one hundred and
twenty feet below stood another log-built
affair, formerly the ice-house. Since Old
Shep had become Chauncey' s permanent
guest, this structure had been equipped
with furnishings as complete and com-
fortable as the house, including plumb-
ing. So there was no reason for Shep to
hang around Old Chauncey's kitchen.

The housekeeper, Celia Lilleoden, per-

formed the chores incidental to both
houses with such easy efficiency that old
Chauncey was repeatedly reminded of his
bachelorhood. From continually sunning
themselves behind the kitchen like two
old snakes the men had acquired a
wrinkled black-walnut finish, but Celia
still retained the firm, buxom ripeness of
an apple.

As a practical communist Old Chaun-
cey kept his latch-key out by inclination.
His generosity was limitless.

Thus, Old Shep did not have to ask
for anything he wanted. It was share and
share alike.

For example, he charged tobacco to
Old Chauncey's account at the store in
town. He always had. If he preferred a
grade of tobacco superior to what Old
Chauncey himself used, sudi was his
privilege. A plug is a plug.

Shep and Chauncey once had occupied
the same double desk of raw cherrywood
in the schoolhouse which was now a
weedy hill of rubble and rotten wood a
half-mile out on the backroad.

Besides words, Old Shep hoarded to-
bacco plugs in case the cause of commun-
ism ever collapsed.

In accordance with this scheme of liv-
ing, Old Chauncey gradually became ac-
customed to being spared the nuisance of
opening the occasional letter he received
from another old soldier fh Sackett's
Harbor, New York. At first Shep had
gone to the trouble of sneaking the mail
down to the ice-house and steaming it
open. But currently the mail arrived slit

489

490

WEIRD TALES

open without any subterfuge. The knife,
incidentally, was the better of Old
Chauncey's two. Shep had borrowed it,
knowing that in communism there can be
no Indian giving.

On one occasion Chauncey accosted
Old Shep behind the kitchen with a
crumpled letter in his fingers.

"Shep," he suggested casually, "I wish
you'd slit my letters open at the top in-
stead of an end. It wouldn't bunch the
writing up so much when you shove it
back inside."

"Chauncey," Old Shep replied tremb-
lingly, "you're not serious with me, are
you? If you want to keep secrets from
your old crony, why, you just tell me seri-
ously not to open those letters any more
and I won't."

It used to give Chauncey a funny feel-
ing when Old Shep talked like that.

OF a somnolent summer morning
while Chauncey was scrubbing his
long yellow teeth he glimpsed blurred
movement through the starched white
bathroom curtain. Tweaking the curtain
somewhat aside he witnessed Old Shep
scampering down the side hill to the ice-
house with a load of kindling in his
arms.

"I'll be dog-goned," swore Old
Chauncey with toothpaste foam dribbling
down his chin. "He complains he can't
do his chopping on account of his rheu-
matism, and look at the old turkey go! I
see where I chop kindling for both of us
from now on."

When Old Shep showed up to get in a
few licks of whittling before breakfast,
Chauncey inquired, "How's that rheu-
matism?"

"Fierce, Chauncey. I'm getting mighty
creaky."

"Well, help yourself to my kindling,

Shep. Long as I know where it's disap-
pearing to, I don't give a durn."

"Thanks, Chauncey; thanks! I knew
you'd feel that way."

The bacon, eggs, and delicately crusty
fried potatoes hit the palate so ambrosial-
ly that, after breakfast, Chauncey was se-
duced into the disastrous error of men-
tioning to Shep the chances of marrying
Miss Lilleoden: error, for it was only
human nature to covet the goods which
another man prized most.

Thenceforward Old Shep neglected his
whittling or idled awkwardly with it in
the kitchen, where a housekeeper spends
most of her time. Chauncey observed
blackly that Old Shep had a cunning way
with him, too.

"Durn it," Chauncey ruminated dis-
mally, "every tiling I want, he gets. If I
tell him to stay away from her he won't
take me seriously. The old hoodoo always
has his way. Anyhow, his durned
whittling is out of my sight."

Befell a morning when Old Shep
didn't appear, and Chauncey found
him stretched out stiff half-way down the
side hill. In Shep's vulturine right fist
was clenched a small crumple of bills.
This pilfering had occurred with such
regularity that the companion of Chaun-
cey's childhood had accumulated just
about enough to get started with Celia
Lilleoden.

Chauncey asked the coroner, a glisten-
ing little round man like a wet dumpling,
"Is he dead?"

"Of course he's dead," said the cor-
oner. "Obviously."

"He has no kin," Celia reminded Old
Chauncey in her slow, soft contralto.

"I'll do him one more favor," Chaun-
cey offered unblinkingly. "He can have
my lot in the cemet'ry."

The lot in Dream Hill Cemetery meas-
ured eight feet long, five feet wide and
ten feet deep, meaning that it had been
excavated and ready for occupancy these
past five years. The walls were common
brick. On the floor was a stone bed to
lie on. Whimsically Chauncey had also
installed a small table furnished with a
tobacco bag and pipe, matches, an alarm
clock with an illuminated dial, and an
ashtray. And a thick, plumber's candle.
The old pagan!

Anchored in the foot-wall of this cell,
ladder-like, were iron rungs which had
enabled him on past occasions to descend
and inspect his subterranean property;
as, on this occasion, he made the trip to
deposit Shep's unfinished wooden chain.

The stone slab sealing the cell had
long been cut with the dangerous adver-
tisement: HERE LIES CHAUNCEY
D " A UTRE VILLE WHOSE WORLDLY
GOODS WERE ANY MAN'S FOR
THE ASKING.

Naturally, a new inscription had to
be chiseled.

"But there ain't any more room in that
piece, Chauncey," the stone-cutter ob-
jected. "You want 'nother stone."

"Turn it upside down and cut it in
the bottom," Old Chauncey directed.
"With that topside staring him in the
face, he'll have something to read in the
hereafter."

The underside, becoming the face, car-
ried the inscription: HERE LIES SHEP-
ARD FRANKENFIELD WHO FEELS
NO ANXIETY FOR THE FUTURE
NOR REGRET FOR THE PAST.

On the day preceding Old Shep's in-
terment, Old Chauncey paid a visit to
the nearest justice of the peace with Celia
Lilleoden and no one thought it was in
the least peculiar. As Chauncey balanced
accounts with himself, the state would
otherwise inherit his property eventually,

as was right, but he wished to insure
Celia's staying on as his housekeeper, in
which capacity she beggared superlatives.

While four huskies furnished by the
undertaker replaced the granite sheet
over the brick chamber, Old Chauncey
recollected the particulars of a certain fit 1
of Shep's, dating about five years before,
shortly before Celia. That catalepsy, or
whatever it was, had gripped Shep as
though in death for nearly three days un-
til Old Chauncey had thought of making
a brassy rumpus next to his ear with the
big dinner bell. Hie alarm clock in the
subterranean mausoleum was set for
eleven o'clock, terminating a like period
of time, when Old Shep might be ex-
pected to wake up and yawn in the here-
after. Just a whim of Chauncey's, since
the coroner had pronounced Old Shep
indisputably defunct.

Late that night Celia surmised wor-
riedly that her absent husband might be
visiting the tomb of his lifelong crony,
and there he was in the sickly forest of
tombstones, hunkering down on Shep's
horizontal tombstone like a boy watching
a game of marbles.

But he was listening, not watching.
He knocked again on the slab with his
bony knuckles, cocked his head. Listening
for the response while the lazy breeze
lifted his silken gray hair in the starry
cave of night, he asked, "Cele, do you
hear him down there?"

Celia's gentle mind recoiled from the
idea that the dead might rise in answer
to a human summons. The stoically re-
strained grief for his departed friend
must have touched her husband some-
what in the head.

On the fifth night Chauncey observed,
"That Old Shep's ghost must be getting
tuckered out."

Celia decided that there was a limit to
indulgence.

492

WEIRD TALES

"Chauncey," she ordered firmly, "you
mustn't come down here any more.
You'll be taking pneumonia."

He accepted the order without protest.

"Maybe thai" he commented to the
frankly puzzled Mrs. Old Chauncey,
"will teach the old grasshopper when to
take a man seriously."

Vhe

ast of Mrs. Debrugh

By H. SIVIA

Mr. DeBrugh was dead, but he still regarded his promise
as a sacred duty to be carried out

"HT ETTY," Mr. DeBrugh remarked
I between long puffs on his meer-
schaum, "you've been a fine
maid. You've served Mrs. DeBrugh and
me for most of fifteen years. Now I
haven't much more time in this life, and
I want you to know that after Mrs. De-
Brugh and I are gone, you will be well
taken care of."

Letty stopped her dusting of the chairs
in Mr. DeBrugh's oak-paneled study.
She sighed and turned toward the man,
who sat on a heavy sofa, puffing on his
pipe and gazing across the room into
nothingness.

'You mustn't talk that way, Mr. De-
Brugh," she said. 'You know you're a
long time from the dark ways yet." She
paused, and then went on dusting and
talking again. "And me — humph — I've
only done what any ordinary human
would do to such a kind employer as you,
sir. Especially after all you've done for
me."

He didn't say anything, and she went
on with her work. Of course she liked to
work for him. She had adored the kindly
old man since first she had met him in an
agency fifteen years before. A person
couldn't ask for a better master.

But there was the mistress, Mrs. De-
Brugh! It was she who gave Letty cause
for worry. What with her nagging
tongue and her sharp rebukes, it was a
wonder Letty had not quit long before.

She would have quit, too, but there
had been the terrible sickness she had
undergone and conquered with the aid
of the ablest physicians Mr. DeBrugh
could engage. She couldn't quit after
that, no matter what misery Mrs. De-
Brugh heaped on her. And so she went
about her work at all hours, never tiring,
always striving to please.

She left the study, closing the great
door silently behind her, for old Mr.
DeBrugh had sunk deeper into the sofa,
into the realms of peaceful sleep, and
she did not wish to disturb him.

"Letty!" -came the shrill cry of Mrs.
DeBrugh from down the hail. "Get these
pictures and take them to the attic at
once. And tell Mr. DeBrugh to come
here."

Letty went for the pictures.

"Mr. DeBrugh is asleep," she said,
explaining why she was not obeying the
last command.

"Well, I'll soon fix that! Lazy old
man! Sleeps all day with that smelly pipe

THE LAST OF MRS. DEBRUGH

493

between his teeth. If he had an ounce
of pep about him, he'd get out and work
the flowers. Sleeps too much anyway.
Not good for him."

She stamped out of the room and down
the hall, and Letty heard her open the
door of the study and scream at her
husband.

"Hector DeBrugh! Wake up!"

There was a silence, during which
Letty wondered what was going on. Then
she heard the noisy clop-clop of Mrs. De-
Brugh 's slippers on the hardwood floor
of the study, and she knew the woman
was going to shake the daylights out of
Mr. DeBrugh and frighten him into
wakefulness. She could even imagine she
heard Mrs. DeBrugh grasp the lapels of
her husband's coat and shake him back
and forth against the chair.

Then she heard the scream. It came
quite abruptly from Mrs. DeBrugh in the
study, and it frightened Letty out of her
wits momentarily. After that there was
the thud of a falling body and the clatter
of an upset piece of furniture.

Letty hurried out of the room into the
hall and through the open door of the
study. She saw Mrs. DeBrugh slumped
on the floor in a faint, and beside her an
upset ash-tray. But her eyes did not
linger on the woman, nor the tray. In-
stead, they focussed on the still form of
Mr. DeBrugh in the sofa.

He was slumped down, his head
twisted to one side and his mouth hang-
ing open from the shaking Mrs. De-
Brugh had given him. The meerschaum
had slipped from between his teeth, and
the cold ashes were scattered on his
trousers.

Even then, before the sea of tears be-
gan to flow from her eyes, Letty knew the
old man was dead. She knew what he
had meant by the speech he had said to
her only a few minutes before.

"TTis heart," was the comment of the
A J. doctor who arrived a short time

later and pronounced the old man dead.

"He had to go. Today, tomorrow. Soon."
After that, he put Mrs. DeBrugh to

bed and turned to Letty.

"Mrs. DeBrugh is merely suffering
from a slight shock. There is nothing
more that I can do. When she awakens,
see that she stays in bed. For the rest of
the day."

He left then, and Letty felt a strange
coldness about the place, something that
had not been there while Mr. DeBrugh
was alive.

She went downstairs and made several
telephone calls which she knew would
be necessary. Later, when Mrs. DeBrugh
was feeling better, other arrangements
could be made.

She straightened the furniture in the
study, pushing the familiar sofa back in
place, from where Mr. DeBrugh invari-
ably moved it. Then she knocked the
ashes from the meerschaum, wiped it off,
and placed it carefully in the little glass
cabinet on the wall where he always
kept it.

Times would be different now, she
knew. She remembered what he had
said. "You will be well taken care of."
But there had been something else.
"After Mrs. DeBrugh and I are gone."

Letty could no longer hold back the
tears. She fell into a chair and they
poured forth.

But time always passes, and with it
goes a healing balm for most all sor-
rows. First there was the funeral. Then
came other arrangements. And there was
the will, which Mrs. DeBrugh never
mentioned.

His things would have fallen into de-
cay but for the hands of Letty. Always
her dust-cloth made his study immacu-
late. Always the sofa was in place and

494

WEIRD TALES

the pipe, clean and shining, in the cab-
inet.

There was a different hardness about
Mrs. DeBrugh. No longer was she con-
tent with driving Letty like a slave day
in and day out. She became even more
unbearable.

There were little things, like taking
away her privilege of having Saturday
afternoons off. And the occasional "for-
getting" of Letty 's weekly pay.

Once Lett)' thought of leaving during
tlie night, of packing her few clothes and
going for ever from the house. But that
was foolish. There was no place to go,
and she was getting too old for maid
service.

Besides, hadn't Mr. DeBrugh said she
would be taken care of. "After Mrs. De-
Brugh and I are gone." Perhaps she
would not live much longer.

And then one morning Mrs. DeBrugh
called Letty in to talk with her. It was
the hour Letty had been awaiting — and
dreading.

There was a harsh, gloating tone in
Mrs. DeBrugh's voice as she spoke. She
was the master now. There was no Hec-
tor to think of.

"Letty," she said, "for some time now
I have been considering closing the
house. I'm lonely here. I intend to go
to the city and live with my sister. So,
you see, I shan't be needing )-ou any
longer. I'll be leaving within the next
two days. I'm s©rry."

Letty was speechless. She had expected
something terrible, but not this. This
wasn't so! Mrs. DeBrugh was lying!
It was tlie will she was afraid of. Letty
remembered Mr. DeBrugh's promise.

She did not complain, however. Her
only words were, "I'll leave tomorrow."

That night she packed her things. She
had no definite plans, but she hoped
something would turn up.

Sleep would not come easy, so Letty
lay in bed and thought of old Mr. De-
Brugh. She imagined he was before her
in the room, reclining on the sofa, pairing
long on the meerschaum. She even saw
in fancy the curling wisps of gray smoke
drifting upward, upward. . . .

It was sleep. Then, with a start, she
was suddenly wide awake.

She had surely heard a scream. But
no.

And then, as soft and as silent as the
night wind, came tlie whisper: "Letty."

It drifted slowly off into silence, and a
cool breeze crossed her brow. She sud-
denly felt wet with perspiration. She
listened closely, but tlie whisper was not
repeated.

Then, noiselessly, she got out of bed,
stepped into slippers, and drew a robe
about her. Just as silently she left her
room and walked down the hall to Mrs.
DeBrugh's bedroom.

She rapped softly on the door, fearing
the wrath of the woman within at being
awakened in tlie middle of the night.
There was no answer, no sound from
inside the room.

Lett)' hesitated, wondering what to do.
And once more she felt that cool, death-
like breeze, and heard the faintest of
whispers, fainter even than tlie sighing
of the night wind: "Letty."

She opened the door and switched on
the light. Mrs. DeBrugh lay in the bed
as in sleep, but Letty knew, as she had
known about Mr. DeBrugh, that it was
more than sleep.

She quickly called the doctor, and
sometime much later he arrived, his eyes
heavy from lack of sleep.

"Dead," he remarked, after looking
at the body. "Probably had a shock.
Fright, nightmare, or something her
heart couldn't stand. I always thought v
she would have died first."

Letty walked slowly from tlie room,

THE LAST OF MRS. DEBRUGH

'495

down the stairs, still in her robe and slip-
pers. The doctor followed and passed
her, going through the door into the
outside.

She walked, as though directed by
some unseen force, into Mr. DeBrugh's
study. She switched on a lamp beside the
sofa on which he had always sat; and she
noticed that it was moved slightly out of
place.

There was something else about the
room, some memory of old days. First
she saw some sort of legal document
on the table and wondered at its being

there. The title said: Last Will and
Testament of Hector A. DeBrugh. It
was brief. She read it through and found
that Mr. DeBrugh had spoken truthfully
in his promise to her.

Beside the will on the table was an-
other object, and she knew then what
the "something else" in the room was.

The meerschaum! It lay there beside
the document, and a thin spiral of gray-
ish smoke rose upward from it toward
the ceiling.

No longer did Letty wonder about
anything.

c/o a Skull
on My Bookshelf

By ELIZABETH VIRGINIA RAPLEE

bony relic of forgotten days,

Which, from my bookshelf, dominates the room,
Your empty sockets, with sardonic gaze,
Follow me weirdly in the deepening gloom!

1 often think, if sudden speech returned,
You might reveal that secret, grisly jest

You're grinning at — or tell me what you've learned
Of that dark realm to which we're all addressed.

By what rude hands were you exhumed, and why
Wrenched from your body in its earthy bed?
Who knows but such indignity will I
Receive at other hands, when I am dead,
And, strangely resurrected, may adorn
The wall or desk of one as yet unborn!

RtPRINT

Vhe (0

C/ur

rple Cincture

By H. THOMPSON RICH

IT WAS a day in midsummer, I re-
member. I had been tramping over
the densely wooded and desolate
hillside the greater part of the morning,
getting with each mile farther and farther
from the tawdry haunts of man and
nearer and nearer the rugged heart of
nature.

Finally (it must have been after noon-
time) I paused and made a light lunch
of the sandwiches and cold coffee I had
brought with me from town, sitting on
the edge of a great slab of granite rock,
swept clean and smooth by ages of winds
and rains and snows.

All about me was a veritable garden
of great projecting rocks, jagged and
broken, flat and polished, needle-like,
giant flowers of earth in a thousand dif-
ferent forms.

Here and there a short, dwarfed pine
or spruce tree struggled for a footing
amid its rocky friends, and the resistless
undergrowth surged up through every
crack and crevice, while energetic mosses
and lichens clutched at the granite walls
and crept bravely up. One had a feeling
of awe, as if in the presence of elemental,

• From WEIRD TALES for August, 1925.
496

eternal forces. Here, I thought, if any-
where, one might commune with the
voiceless void.

Suddenly my eyes chanced to fall upon
a fissure in the rock to the left, and I
sprang up with a low exclamation. What
I had beheld was to all appearance a
human skeleton!

Advancing reluctantly, yet with that
insistent inquisitivencss which surrounds
the dead, I bent, and peered into the fis-
sure. As I looked, a cry escaped me. The
object I beheld was indeed a skeleton —
but what a skeleton! The head, the left
hand, and the foot were entirely missing,
nor was there any sign of them at first
sight.

Thoroughly fascinated by the morbid
spectacle, I began a search for the miss-
ing members, and was finally rewarded
by unearthing the head some twenty feet
away, where it lay half buried in the soft
loam of decayed vegetation and sifted
chole. But a painstaking and minute
hunt failed to reveal the missing hand
and foot.

I was successful, however, in finding
something immeasurably more important

W. T.— 7

THE PURPLE CINCTURE

497

— a manuscript. This I found by the side
of the mangled skeleton.

It consisted of several pages of closely
written material, in a small pocket note-
book, which fact, in connection with the
partial shelter afforded by the crevice
where the body lay, doubtless accounts
for its preservation through the years that
have passed since its owner met his hid-
eous fate.

Picking up the notebook with nerv-
ous fingers, I opened it and turned
the damp and musty pages through, read-
ing it at first hastily, then slower and
more carefully, then with a feverish con-
centration — as the awful significance of
the words was riveted into my brain.

The writing was in a man's cramped,
agitated hand, and I give it to you just as
I read it, with the exception of the names
and places, and a few paragraphs of vital
scientific data — all but a few words at
the very beginning and end, where the
manuscript had been molded into illegi-
bility by the gradual action of the
weather. Here follows:

" as strange. I had a sense of ap-
prehension from the start, a vague, in-
describable feeling of doubt, of dread, as
if someone, something, were urging me
out, away, into these sullen hills.

"I might have known. The law of
retribution is as positive as the law of
gravity. I know that now. Oh irony!

"But I was so sure. No one knew. No
one could know. She, my wife, heart of
all, until the end. And the neighbors, her
friends, never. She had merely pined
away. No one dreamed I had poisoned
her. Even when she died, there was no
thought of autopsy. She had long been
failing. And had I not been most con-
cerned? None in the little town of

, but who sympathized with me.

And I mourned. Oh, I mourned! So it
W. T.— 8

was that she paid the price of her infamy.
All, but revenge never was sweeter!

"And he? Oh, but I despised him —
even as I had formerly admired him,
even as I had once loved my wife — so
I despised him. And despising him, I
killed him — killed him, but with a poi-
son far more subtle than that I had used
to destroy my wife — killed him with a
poison in effect so hideous, so harrowing,
that I can scarcely think of it without
sickening even as I write.

"The poison I inculcated into his veins
was a germ poison — a disease I, a physi-
cian of no small repute, had discovered
and bred — a disease I had found existed
only in a particular and very rare species
of virulent purple and orange-banded

spider — the genus [Here follow

in the original manuscript seven para-
graphs of elaborate scientific data, of no
particular interest to the average reader,
but of incalculable import to the scientific
world. These paragraphs I have omitted
from this account for very significant rea-
sons, but I hold them open to scientific
examination at any time, and as I have
said before, I will welcome investigation
by reputable scientists] — a disease which
was responsible for the extreme rarity of
this particular species.

"By careful investigation I was able to
learn the exact manifestation and work-
ings of the disease — which by their
frightful ravages upon the system of the
unfortunate victim fairly appalled me.

"By segregating and breeding diseased
members of this particular species of
spider, I was able to produce the disease
in the young in its most virulent form.
You can well imagine the care I used in
handling these spiders, to prevent infec-
tion. Briefly, the symptoms were as fol-
lows: The spider about to be stricken ap-
parently first experiences a peculiar
numbness of the first left foreleg, to
judge from its inability to use or move

498

WEIRD TALES

the affected member. A day or so later
the leg, which in a healthy condition is a
dull brown, turns a pale, sickening shade
of yellow, which deepens rapidly until it
has taken on a flaming orange hue. Then,
in a few hours, a deep, vicious-looking
blue cincture, or band, appears just at the
first joint of the affected member. This
cincture rapidly deepens to purple, which
seems somehow to sear its way into the
flesh and through the bone, so that in a
surprizingly short time the whole leg is
severed at the joint where the cincture
has been.

"The spider then appears to regain its
normal condition of health, which it
maintains for about a week; then once
again the hideous disease manifests itself,
this time in the left feeler, or antenna,
which in turn becomes yellow, then
orange, whereupon the same blue cinc-
ture appears and deepens to purple; then,
in about the same period of time as in the
case of the leg, the antenna drops off,
seared as if by some hellish flame.

"Once again the spider appears to re-
gain its health; then in about a week the
whole head of the stricken insect turns
slowly yellow, then orange; then the
cincture appears — and as a last manifesta-
tion, the head is seared off in flaming
agony — and the spider dies in horrible
convulsions.

"That, briefly, is the process — as I was
able to note after weeks and months of
tireless research and observation.

"So what more perfect punishment
for the man who stole from me my wife,
while pretending to be my friend?

"Toving her as I did, I had not the
JLrf heart to kill her in this hideous
way: so I put her to death with a painless
and insidious poison.

"But for I had no mercy. In

fact I gloated as I worked over my vile
and diseased spiders, breeding them to-

gether until I was convinced that I had
the germs of the disease in its most viru-
lent form. Even then I was not sure
what their effect would be on a human
being — but that much at least I must
hazard.

"So having finally made all my prep-
arations, I invited him to my house and
placed one of the diseased spiders upon
his forehead one night as he slept.

"It must have bitten him, for he
awoke with a cry, and I had barely time
to close his door and get back to my
room before I heard him rise and turn on
the light.

"Then he called me, and I came to
him, burning with a fiendish satisfaction.
"Something has bitten me, horribly,' he
said. "I feel as if I were going to be ill.'

"I managed to reassure him by telling
him that it was very likely nothing but
one of our uncommonly large mosqui-
toes, and he returned to bed.

"But he did not sleep. All night I
heard him moaning and tossing. And in
the morning he was very pale.

" 'I do not know what is the matter
with me,' he said, and I thought he
looked at me queerly, 'but I feel as if a
little rest would do me good. I feel
choked. I think I will pack up my knap-
sack and go off to the hills for the week-
end. Want to come?'

"I longed to go with him, to see the
dread disease work, but I feared its dead-
ly contagion, and was anxious to get him
away before I myself became contam-
inated. So I said no — and he went.

"That was the last I ever saw of him
— but once.

"TJ e went away, as he had prom-
JLJL ised, and he seemed apparently
well — all except the curious little in-
flamed spot on his forehead, whose sig-
nificance I knew so well.

"He went away — and he failed to

THE PURPLE CINCTURE

499

come back. Days passed, and there came
no word from him. People began inquir-
ing. It was odd that he should have left
no address. His business suffered.

"Weeks went by — and no word.
Search parties were sent out. The river
was dragged. The morgues of near-by
cities were searched. And all the while I
laughed. For who would think of turning
to those far-off hills?

"And yet, as the days went by, I found
t myself turning to them again — wonder-
ing, wondering, wondering. I grew nerv-
ous, agitated. I got so I couldn't sleep.

"Finally, on a day in late summer (it
was the 8th of August — date I shall
never forget!) I packed a few things and
set off. In search of him? God knows. I
tried to tell myself not — but at any rate
I found myself strangely, magnetically
drawn to those distant somber hills — and
thither I went.

"It was one of those gorgeous morn-
ings that only August can produce, and
the exhilarating air would have lifted my
spirits, but instead I walked along de-
pressed, and the knapsack strapped to my
shoulder served only to intensify the
feeling.

"In spite of all I could do, I found
my mind reverting to the hideous revenge
I had wreaked on my wife and her lover,
and for the first time repentance stole in
upon me.

"I walked along slowly, and it was
well toward noon before I left the beaten
road and started at random off over the
hills, following a narrow and little-used
path.

"Progress now became doubly slow
and painful, leading often up steep in-
clines and hard descents, with the aspect
momentarily becoming more and more
rugged, as I left the lower hills and
climbed toward the mountain.

"By this time, however, I had got a
kind of exhilaration sought in vain dur-

ing the earlier hours of the morning, and
climbed on and on, glad to free body and
mind thus of the poison of brooding and
lassitude. I would return to the town at
night and take supper at one of the small
inns that abounded thereabouts. This
would give me some hours yet before I
turned back. For the time being, the
thought of searching for was for-
gotten. I had freed my mind of him en-
tirely.

""■presently the path I had been fol-
Jl lowing branched, and the right half
narrowed into an all but obliterated trail,
leading up a laborious slope. Forcing my
way over dry, snapping underbrush and
under low-hanging spruce boughs, occa-
sionally starting an indignant partridge
from its hidden nest, often put to a wide
detour to avoid some hazardous gully
cut deep by centuries of spring and
autumn freshets, I at last emerged upon
a small, circular clearing, evidently the
work of some lone woodchopper.

"Here I sat down, tired by the climb,
and refreshed myself with a sandwich
from my knapsack. Then I pushed on to
the summit, pausing frequently to ex-
amine some uncommon species of insect
life with which the hills abounded.

"So much was I enjoying myself and
such scant notice of the time did I take,
that sunset came upon me unawares and
I found myself, with darkness settling in
on all sides with a startling rapidity, still
on the summit of the mountain, with a
good three-mile descent before me. In-
deed, the prospect was not altogether a
cheering one and I reproached myself for
my heedlessness. But I had found a
species of spider for which I had searched
in vain for months; so, somewhat reas-
sured by its precious body in a pill-box in
my pocket, I started down.

"In spite of my best speed, however,
night shut in on me before I had made

500

WEIRD TALES

one quarter of the return, leaving me to
grope the rest of the way in utter dark-
ness, with not even the light of a dim
star to go by. Vague fear awoke within
me, but I shielded my eyes and stumbled
to the bottom, sliding, falling, clutching
here and there at some projecting tree-
limb to check my headlong descent.
Finally, torn and disheveled and shaking,
I emerged upon the clearing. Pausing
only for breath, I plunged on into the
dark. Fear was growing — growing — that
peculiar fear of the dark which is the
heritage of those who have taken human
life.

"What was that? Something lay gleam-
ing queerly ahead, with a dull phosphor-
escent glow. I stooped and picked it up
— and flung it from me shuddering. It
was the skeleton of a human foot!

"I groped on, my every heartbeat
choking at my throat. Of a sudden I
came forcefully against a barrier of rock.
I tried to feel my way around it, to get
beyond it, but could not. It seemed con-
tinuous, a solid wall that would not let
me by. Had I fallen into a trap in the
darkness? Terrified, I turned — and there
lay something else gleaming with that
same weird phosphorescent glow! Sick
with terror and dread, half fearing what
it might be, I sprang on it and picked it
up — picked it up — the rotting hand of a
human being! With a stifled gasp I flung
it from me, reeled, tripped through some
vines, and fell swooning.

"V\7" HEN I came to myself, I struck a
▼ ▼ match and looked about me. Its
feeble flame revealed a pair of damp,
rocky walls,, low and vaulted. I was in
some sort of cavern.

"Later on J crept out, collected an arm-
ful of sticks, brought them back, and
soon had a fire started. By its light I ob-
served that the rear of the cave was still
in darkness, and judging that it must ex-

tend back indefinitely, I gave my atten-
tion to my immediate surroundings —
when with a shock I saw, directly in front
of me, a granite slab. On it lay several
loose sheets of manuscript, scrawled wild-
ly on odd scraps of paper.

"With a prophetic dread I bent for-
ward and gathered the loose sheets to-
gether. Holding them near the fire, I
peered closer. Then I think a cry must
have escaped me. The writing was in

's hand, curiously scrawled and

scraggy, but still recognizable.

"So fate had brought me to my victim!

"For the rest, there is little more to
say. I am doomed as I deserve, even as
he was doomed. His words speak all that
can be spoken. They follow:

April 4th — / bad meant to spend only
* the week-end in these hills, yet here
1 am, after two weeks — still here, and
suffering the pains of hell. What has
come over me I cannot imagine. And yet
— can I not? I am not so sure! Perhaps

— perhaps has in some devilish

way managed to poison me. He is insane-
ly jealous. He thinks there was some-
thing between his wife and me. V erily 1
believe he harassed her to death on the
subject. And, having thus brought her to
her grave, he wishes to send me there.

Perhaps he will succeed — if it is true,
that in some fiendish way he has got some
of his germs into my blood. That bite,
at his house that evening. I am not so
sure. It was a most unusual bite. It
seemed upon the instant to sour ail my
blood.

And yet, if he accomplishes my death,
how vain it will be — for as God is my
witness I swear 1 never harmed his wife.
We were the best of friends, nothing
more. And she loved him with a whole-
ness, a passion that any but a man mad-
dened by groundless jealousy must at
once have seen.

THE PURPLE CINCTURE

501

How he has wrecked his life! A mind
so brilliant — and yet, with her dead, a
closed room.

However, 1 may be wrong. I will wait.
By the symptoms I will know. I write
this down, for 1 must do something.

April 5th — // is he now, his hellish
work. I am sure of it. Today my left
leg, which for two weeks has felt posi-
tively numb, turned a sickening yellow,
from the ankle down, which began at
once to deepen, until it now flames or-
ange. And oh! the pain is hellish! Yes, 1

am sure it is 's work. But I will

still withhold judgment.

April 6th — Today a deep, virulent
blue cincture has appeared just at the
ankle of the affected leg. What a hellish
contrast to the orange!

It is . / am sure now. Oh,

what a fiend!

April 7th — The cincture has deep-
ened to purple, and seems to cut into the
very flesh. It seems sometimes as if the
pain would drive me mad.

April. 8th — My flaming foot dropped
off tonight, seared at the ankle by the
purple cincture, and I flung it outside the
cave. I wonder. Perhaps I may yet live
to return to the world. Ah, I will be
avenged for this!

May 23RD — / am cursed, cursed! To-
day, just as I was beginning to believe
the hellish thing had left me, it returned,
this time in my left hand. Oh, I can see
it all: tomorrow and the next day and the
next, for just two weeks, my hand will be
numb; then will come that frightful yel-
low: then the orange; then — then the
purple cincture!

Curse the man who discovered this
hellish disease — and turned it into me!
I could tear him limb from limb. Oh, I

pray to return! I would go now, yet I
fear my malady is of a vilely contagious
nature. I have not the heart to menace a
whole community, perhaps a whole na-
tion, perhaps humanity itself — merely to
avenge myself on one man.

June 6th — / was right! This morn-
ing I awoke with my hand that death-
yellow. Oh, it is too regular, too certain
— too cruelly certain!

June 9th — Thank God! My hand is
gone — out there where my foot went. It
happened tonight. Perhaps I may yet re-
turn! Perhaps 1 may yet be avenged. I
wonder.

July 21st — Doomed! That fearful
numbness again — this time in my head.
I cannot think — / cannot write — / can
scarcely breathe. Oh, the pain — the
pain

U TJ ERE it ended in a sputter of ink.

A -i. Trembling in every limb, filled
with a horror and anguish and remorse
no man can know, spellbound by the aw-
ful tale those few sheets told, I sat there
motionless.

"So I had been wrong. Oh, my jeal-
ousy, my insane jealousy! As I sat there,
all desire of life suddenly left me, and I
thrilled with joy at the remembrance of
the hand and foot I had come upon, out-
side the cave. They were his. I had
touched them. I was contaminated with
the dread disease.

"What was that? I listened, straining
every nerve. From the back of the cav-
ern had come a sound.

"Five minutes passed — ten — fifteen (I
was oblivious of time) — but it was not
repeated. Slightly I relaxed my aching
nerves and tried to think. Already I fan-
cied I could feel the fearful poison of the
diseased spider working in my veins.

"Suddenly the significance of that last

502

WEIRD TALES

entry in 's diary burst upon me,

and I sat shivering as under a sudden del-
uge of icy water. 'July 21st.' Two weeks
more would make it August 5th, and
three days more would bring it to —
August 8th!

" "Great God!' I cried aloud, 'tonight
is the night!'

" 'Yes, tonight is the night!' echoed a
sepulchral voice from the cavern's inner
darkness.

"In an agony of dread I looked, and
the blood within me paled to water at the
sight that met my gaze. Something —
something with but a single hand and
foot — emerged from the shadows of the
back of the cavern and began to come
forward, leaning heavily upon a rough
staff for support.

" 'Stay back — stay back! For the love
of God!" I shrieked. But the terrible
thing came on and on, and the awful eyes
fastened themselves upon my person and
suddenly recognized me — and it smiled a
hideous smile.

"When it drew nearer, I could see that
all above the shoulders flamed orange,
while around the neck a livid purple cinc-
ture seemed actually to be searing its way
into the flesh.

" 'This is your revenge," it spoke. 'And
this is mine,' raising the hellish stump of

its mutilated left arm and panting heavily
at me: 'My suffering is over — but yours
is all Lo come. And to the bodily pains
of hell will be added the mental tortures
of hopeless remorse — knowing your wife
was innocent. With that I curse you.'

"Even as it spoke, the eyes rolled out
of sight behind horrible lids, the tongue
protruded itself in flaming agony, and the
whole head, suddenly severed at the neck,
thudded upon the cavern floor.

"I came to my feet with a mad cry,
that, shattering the silence beyond the
deepest shadows, swelled up in a thou-
sand echoes, from the wail of a soul in
torment to the screech of a crucified de-
mon. Then I rushed headlong out.

"For the rest "

The last page was illegible, as the first
had been, worn and corroded by the
slow action of years of decay.

I put the notebook slowly in my pocket
and sat there thinking, sickened and awed
by the astounding manuscript.

Again I went over to the skeleton there
in the fissure. Now I understood why
the hand and foot were missing, and why
I had found the head many feet from the
body.

There it lay, mute evidence that the
retribution was complete.

c yjf iter Two Nights of the

Ear-Ache

By FRANCIS HARD

Most gentle Sleep! Two nights I wooed in vain;
Thou wouldst not come to banish racking pain:
For what is Sleep but Life in stone bound fast?
Oblivion of the Present, Future, Past.

THE letter from G. M. Wilson,
printed below, makes an astonishing
accusation against Weird Tales; as-
tonishing because this magazine has often
been blamed for a policy the exact opposite
of that attributed to us by Mr. Wilson. He
says, in effect, that our stories lack interest
because the reader knows in advance that
they will all end happily, the villain will be
defeated and virtue will triumph no matter
what odds are against such an ending. We
recall that Weird Tales was once rebuked
by one of the magazines for writers because
of our publication of The Seeds of Death by
David H. Keller (July, 1931). The story
was called "immoral" because the hero was
given over to a lingering death, and the vil-
lainess succeeded in her evil schemes. One
of our interplanetary stories was criticized by
some of our readers because the red-headed
reporter, who had endeared himself to the
readers, was killed on Mars and could not
return to Earth with die rest of the space-
traveling party. A glance at the August
issue (which is on the stands as this is writ-
ten) shows at least four stories that refute
Mr. Wilson's accusation against us. In one
of these (The Will of the Dead by Loretta
Burrough) a scheming mother, who had
dominated her son's life, wrought a hideous
doom upon her innocent daughter-in-law;
all of which makes a fascinating story but
does not allow virtue to triumph. In another
(The Last Pharaoh by Thomas P. Kelley),
the lovable English girl and her brother had
their bodies taken from them so that the
Pharaoh and his paramour could acquire their
healthy bodies on which to transplant their
own heads — surely a defeat of all that is
good; the evil deed is not undone either,
even though destruction overtakes the guilty
pair at the last. Most of our stories do end
happily because that is the way the authors

write them ; but our readers can never know
in advance whether the ending will be hap-
py or otherwise. Mr. Wilson's letter follows.

Does Virtue Always Win?

G. M. Wilson, whose letter we have
answered above, writes from Rosebank, New
York: "I realize that this epistle is slated
for immediate deposit in the nethermost
depths of the wastebasket, but nevertheless
I still am having the satisfaction of getting
something off my chest that has been both-
ering me for some time. The point I am
bringing up is, I suppose, one of the un-
mentionables of die 'pulps'. It is, to put it
tersely: why must virtue always triumph? I
read some years ago that a writer who
wished to achieve success with your type of
magazine must never let heroism be over-
come by villainy. I see that your authors
have taken this lesson to heart, or perhaps
it is your editorial policy to accept only
stories which follow this category. Now
there is no doubt that your publication could
be one of the best 'escape mechanisms' in
the literary field; however, it becomes mo-
notonous to an extreme after the first two
issues. The remedy is simple: you need only
to vary your menu slightly. Your authors
display enough ingenuity and skill; your
field, that of the uncanny, is interesting; in
fact, you lack only the quality of variety to
elevate your magazine far above the pulp
class. Why not let the reader have some
reasonable doubt as to whether the 'fair-
haired boy' will conquer the nasty villain or
monstrosity. As it is now, no one is ever in
doubt as to the outcome. Our upright young
American will win, no matter what the odds.
It is similar to the old-time movie serials
where die hero falls down a thousand-foot
cliff at the end of part nine and comes up
as strong as ever in part ten. It is true that

503

504

WEIRD TALES

you publish stories of the extraordinary, but,
God, it is too extraordinary to stomach hav-
ing right win continually. It isn't life. You
may say that you are not writing about life,
that I can get my sordid realism in the con-
temporary fiction of the Hemingway school,
but I think you can get my point. The point
is that you have the makings of an excellent
magazine, above the class of the usual pulp,
yet you usually and deliberately tie yourself
down with this one flaw. I suppose you are
a success financially and have a large reading
public, but don't you think you could widen
your appeal and increase your circulation by
adopting the above suggestion? No doubt
I am wrong, for it is your business to know
the psychology of your reading public; and
yet I'm not so sure I'm wrong. I think
there's something in all of us that delights
in the exaltation of evil. I am no publicity
hound, but I think if you were to publish
this letter and ask for comments you would
find that many of your readers would agree
with me. In any event, if you could answer
me personally and state your reasons for
the exclusion of all stories in which the hero
doesn't triumph, I should be grateful. Frank-
ly, I am curious."

Save the Necrononiicon !

Elaine Mclntire, of Maiden, Massachu-
setts, writes: "Madam Brundage certainly
can draw, but she doesn't make her 'femmes'
look scared. They are too beautiful. I liked
Virgil Finlay's cover last month ; hope he
does more soon. That reminds me — is Mr.
Ball going to give us more of Raid, prince
of thieves? I sincerely wish he would. [Yes,
you shall have more Raid stories. — The
Editor.} But! what in tarnation is The Ter-
rible Parchment? Is our friend Wellman
trying to put my pet book Necronotnicon on
the spot? Well, he'd better not try! I'm up
in arms! I like to think that there is such a
thing. It gives me something to think about
coming home alone late at night along dark
streets. What about it, readers? Are we
going to le-t that pass ? . . . For myself, I like
nice, gray, werewolf stories. And the more
murky, gory, and slinky a story is the better
I like it."

Some Suggestions

Lawrence Miller, of Norfolk, Virginia,
writes: "The stories in your magazine are
all good. You have no kicks coming. But

I have several suggestions that would tend
to make the magazine perfect. The first:
Why such a stria policy in your reprint de-
partment? As matters stand, Weird Tales
readers are given only the shorter stories
from your back issues. Weren't there some
praiseworthy longer ones? Of course there
is the old cry against long reprints — Authors
must eat! — but you could easily circumvent
that. When you plan to reprint a novelette,
merely skip a reprint for one month and
make up tor it the second month. Or use
smaller type. After all, the type in the Eyrie
has not harmed my eyes. The second idea
concerns those two great writers who died
recently — Lovccraft and Howard. For a long
time they carried the burden of writing
Weird Tales largely between diem, and the
great majority of your readers has probably
never seen either of them. How about pic-
tures? A photograph of each carried inside
your cover. Make good likenesses of them
(they deserve it) and have no writing on
the picture! If necessary, charge extra for
that particular issue. Or skip the other il-
lustrations. Or even skip the stories. But
give us those photographs. I will close with
an appreciation of Henry Kuttner. He is the
most versatile artist to ever appear in Weird
Tales. The Jest of Droom Avista is every
bit as good as The Eater of Souls, which up
to last month was the best ever printed. He
is one of the two really worthwhile weird
poets. The other is — or was — Edgar Allan
Poe. Let's have another as good as Ragna-
rok."

Trudy Answers Our Critics

Gertrude Hemken, of Chicago, writes:
"Comes my monthly gab-letter to aggervate
and p'raps delight you. Eustest of all, I
must express my complete and wholly satis-
factory pleasure at "the Abyss Under the
World. Gracious me, I still feel as though
I had been awakened from a strange and
charming dream — particularly that tour along
the spur with the chasm below — soundless
and depthless — now I want to go back to
sleep and continue that dream, only I know
I must wait. Still there is a satisfaction that
the story will be completed, whereas a real
dream from which one awakens, seldomly is
finished if an attempt is made to try that*
(Gosh, that sounds garbled — but I trust you
know what my object is.) Anyhow, I feel
(Please turn to page 506 )

COMING NEXT MONTH

THE rivet-studded oaken door crashed open, splintering from the assault of pike-butts
whose thunderous echoes still rolled around the walls of the tiny stone room re-
vealed beyond the wreck of the shattered door. Jirel, the warrior-maid of Joiry,
leaped in through the splintered ruins, dashing the red hair from her eyes,' grinning with
effort, gripping her two-edged sword. But in the ruin of the door she paused. The mail-
clad men at her heels surged around her in the doorway like a wave of blue-bright steel,
and then paused too, staring.

For Franga the warlock was kneeling in his chapel, and to see Franga on his knees was
like watching the devil recite a paternoster. But it was no holy altar before which the wiz-
ard bent. The black stone of it bulked huge in this tiny, bare room echoing still with the
thunder of battle, and in the split-second between the door's fall and Jircl's crashing entry
through its ruins Franga had crouched in a last desperate effort at — at what?

His bony shoulders beneath their rich black robe heaved \% itli frantic motion as he fin-
gered the small jet bosses that girdled the altar's block. A slab in the side of it fell open
abruptly as the wizard, realizing that his enemy was almost within sword's reach, whirled
and crouched like- a feral tiling. Blazing light, cold and unearthly, streamed out from the
gap in the altar.

"So that's where you've hidden it!" said Jirel with a savage softness.

Over his shoulder Franga snarled at her, pale lips writhing back from discolored teeth.
Physically he was terrified of her, and his terror paralyzed him. She saw him hesitate, evi-
dently torn between his desire to snatch into safety what was hidden in the altar and his
panic fear of her sword chat dripped blood upon the stones. . . .

You will not want to miss this utterly strange and thrilling novelette, in which Jirel
and Northwest Smith join forces against the mighty evil powers of Franga the warlock.
Two of the most popular writers of fantastic fiction have collaborated to make this story
gripping and fascinating. It will be printed complete in next month's Weird Tales:

QUEST OF THE STARSTONE

By C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

Also

LIVING BUDDHESS

By Seabury Quinn

A fascinating tale of a living female Buddha and
the dreadful change that befell a lovely American
girl — a talc of Jules de Grandin, and a dire lama
from out of devil-ridden Asia.

DREAD SUMMONS

By Paul Ernst

The old butler heard a scream, muffled by the
street noises from ourside, and when he investi-
gated he found that a dread summons had been
answered.

THE VOYAGE OF THE NEUTRALLY

By B. Wai ms

An exciting story of weird adventures and a
strange voyage through space to other planets —
by the author of "The Abysmal Horror'* and
other fascinating thrill-tales.

THE SECRET OF SEBEK

By Robert Bloch

What grisly horror, spawned in prehistoric ages
in ancient Egypt, stalked through that weird
house in New Orleans? A tale of the Mardi
Gras.

November Issue Weird Tales . . Out October 1

595

WEIRD TALES

THE EYRIE

(Continued from page 3 04 J

that Mr. Suter is just dandy — the sample is
fine. Nextest, I orter do something about
the finis of The Last Pharaoh — 'twarn't bad
atall atall — somehow I really didn't feel bad
that lovely Carol and her dear brother were
not restored to their original bodies, but,
muh goo'ness sakes, warn't thet princess
Atma the hungry gal? She had a bad bad
case of the 'girnmies' — wuss then some of
our gold diggers. Nope, 'twarn't a bad
story at that — I was wholly satisfied with it
from the start. After all, the villain was
defeated and that should be enough for any
reader, sez I. Thank you, Mr. Kelley, for *
some mighty entertaining reading. ... A
very queer tale was this Thing of Darkness
— I never heerd tell of quite such a ghost
before. He really was a rotter, I must say.
I liked the unusual note of the old Mrs.
Burden's sacrificing herself that a ghost
might be laid. Rather unusual form of
exorcism — isn't it ? The Mandarin 's Ear was
rather refreshing in its lightness — almost
humorous in that the ear of another could
hear all about its former possessor. Quite an
idea that! Finlay's illustration is nice, too,
although I can't say the beauty looks very
Chinese. Eurasian more or less, with a
strong inclination to the Russian. Loretta
Burrough has something there. The Will of
the Dead is a fine example of what some
mothers would like to do to their sons'
wives. Some mothers are intensely jealous
of their sons. Don't say me nay — I know!
This mother in the tale was a tyrant, no
less. . . . And so Henry Kuttner tells us
Dis is a city of iron! Sounds like bad pro-
nunciation to me. Tsk tsk — HK. Yes sir,
live and learn, live and learn, sez I — the old
alchemists never learned to make precious
metals of baser products, and those who suc-
ceeded — well, look at Droom Avista — as
also King Midas. I just wonder if Mr.
Wellman believes that his 'Necronomicon
story to end all N stories' will really end
them. Somehow I wish it would — I could
never get myself to pronounce the word
correctly and I'd have it wandering in my
brain, popping into my thoughts at the most
unweird tames. Shall we wait and see if it
really is the end of all N stories, Mr. W.?
Now to the Eyrie — it's high time I start

stepping on a few toes, and giving boosts to
others. First an orchid to J. 2. Thompson
who wrote from Glendale, California — I
liked his catchy phrase — 'pulse-pepping.'
Mrs. H. L. Phillips of Quincy, Illinois,
seems so very prosaic in her statement of the
magazine being 'in general very interesting.'
Mrs. P. — that sounds much too polite — why
don't you whack down a real statement and
say: 'I think it's just the bestest of all the
bestest, and — well, it's just the nuts, no less.'
Or don't you understand my language? I
agree with Robert J. Hoyer of my own fair
and windy city that Doctor Lamonraine is a
fine character for a yarn — one of those rip-
roaring topers — yet a he-man — and entirely
lovable. We will have more of him, won't
we? T. O. Mabbott is going to get a toe-
trodding — perhaps it would be better for
him to reread Clicking Red Heels — the
young millionaire did have more than one
pair of shoes, and the story ends that 'in
every pair of his shoes were found these
strange clicking devices' — the question I
raised in regard to that was how the dooce
anyone could get hold of all his shoes and
insert those clickers. As for the question of
the hollow appearing on the seat beside the
young man in his roadster — well, don't you,
my friend, have an imagination? Don't you
know that when a person wants to and yet
fears to, he will see what is not there? Such
was the case with the young millionaire.
Or perhaps Mr. Ernst can explain it better
than I. That will be all this time — I am
happy to see Seabury Quinn again for next
month. I am also awaiting the meeting of
Jirel and NWSmith quite anxiously."

A Threadbare Theme

Clifton Hall, of Los Angeles, writes:
"Strangely enough, the thing that has caused
me to break the ice and pen my first letter
to the Eyrie is the fact that I find that your
August issue falls short, in my estimation,
of your usual high standard of excellence.
The cover itself was the first thing to give
me this impression. It seemed rather care-
lessly done. Then, too, where are all the
pretty nudes that once made WT so attrac-
tive and readable? All of my WT-fan
friends here in Los Angeles agree with me
that the WT of two years ago was made far
more entertaining by the well-done nudes
that featured the cover and stories. There is
certainly nothing pornographic about it; all

WEIRD TALES

507

artists agree that a well-done nude is the
highest form of artistic expression. And
Finlay and Brundage — especially the former
— seem capable of doing them well. But
back to the magazine itself : I don't think
I'm unfair to Thing of Darkness, the fea-
tured story, when I say that it has the old-
est spooky-story plot on the face of the
globe. Since the time of Charles Dickens —
and where he got it I can't say — it has been
used so many times in books, plays, short-
Stories, movies, radio dramas, etc., etc., that
you could get out a magazine of twice the
thickness of \VT every week from now to
2000 A. D., and still not reprint more than
half of them. This is the only one that real-
ly got my ire up, but there were several
others that I thought rather mediocre. The
Abyss Under the World seemed to be writ-
ten more in die style of a pulp detective
thriller than a real weird story ; and per-
haps I'm being a bit hasty, inasmuch as there
is another installment to be printed, but isn't
it a bit strange that the Egyptians under the
ground should speak nothing but English?
I thought World of the Dark Dwellers was
pretty good, although the idea of mechanical

masters who had once been men living
underground and preying on the 'light
dwellers' is strangely like H. G. Wells'
The Time Machine. I enjoyed The Man-
darin's Ear, The Last Pharaoh, 'and the Love-
craft reprint, though, and according to the
'trailer' of next month's issue, WT seems
destined to return to its former high level.
Here's hoping."

The Dead Masters

Reginald A. Pryke, of Kent, England,
writes: "Since way back in 1925 we (that
means three of us) have been your loyal
followers and admirers. In the days of
Senf's covers, monthly Jules de Grand ins,
Henry S. Whitehead and Dunwich Horrors,
into Rankin's era with his clouded, evil,
misty illustrations, bursting into Howard's
pulsating epics, Depression days and bi-
monthly issues — terrible time of famine —
and so into the present day. Per ardua ad
astral You have a record to be proud of, a
future to encourage you to even greater ef-
forts, and a spirit to take the sad blows Fate
has dealt you unflinchingly. A moment to
think of The Fallen. Whitehead: Who

BACK COPIES

Because of the many requests for back issues of Weird Tales, the publishers do their best
to keep a sufficient supply on hand to meet all demand*-. This magazine was established early
in 1923 and there has been a steady drain on the supply of back copies ever since. At present,
we have the following back numbers on hand for sale:

1833

1933

1934

1935

1938

1937

Jan,

Jan.

Jan.

Jan.

Jan.

Feb.

Feb.

Feb.

Feb.

Feb.

Mar.

Mar.

Mar.

Mar.

Apr.

Apr.

Apr.

Apr.

May

May

May

Muy

June

July

June

June

June

June

Aug.;

July

July

July

July

Aug.

sipt.

Sept.

Sept,

Sept.

Oct.

Oct.

Oct.

Nov.

Nov.

Nov.

Nov.

Dec.

Dec.

Dec.

These back numbers contain many fascinating stories. If you are interested in obtaining
any of the back copies on this list please hurry your order because we can not guarantee that
the list will be as complete as it now is within the next 30 days. The price on all back issues
is 25c per copy. Mail all orders to:

WEIRD TALES
840 N. Michigan Ave. Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A.

508

WEIRD TALES

writes obi stories as he used to do? West
Indies, Haiti, voodooism, witchcraft — no-
body can match his flawless literary style and
tingling terms. Arlton Eadie: The teller of
ghost stories, par excellence. Howard : How-
ard the great, the incomparable, the master.
Howard, whose tales were breathless sagas
snatched vibrant with life from the mouths
of the scalds of old. Howard, who lifted his
characters out of the dust and decay of
times long forgotten, breathed eager, lusting,
laughing, fighting life into them, clapped
swords in their fists, and sent them tramping
the witch-haunted, battle- strewn roads; men,
every one, revelling in life and its joys, wine,
women and the mad exhilaration of combat.
Howard is dead. Solomon Kane, King Kull,
Conan the Barbarian who set a crown upon
his black head and defied all this world and
the next to deprive him of it. Three real
literary achievements, three who will live
now that he is gone and the hand writes no
more. . . . Revive Conan? Never, never,
never! No, the sagas are finished. There
was a hint of finality about Howard's last
Conan story, Red Nails; a knitting-up of
loose strands, a rounding-off as if he some-
how knew he was completing a task. In
that story I thought Conan found at last his
mate, his long-sought-for companion. To-
gether they left that evil place; together (but
only in our imaginations) let them travel on
towards whatever lies ahead. Let each true
lover of the great barbarian dream his own
tales of battle, love and brooding witch-
craft. Any other course savors of sacrilege.
Read and read again what has been written,
but let no other man try and wield that pen
or gird on that sword. Bury them with him.
He will sleep the quieter. And Lovecraft:
Let the men who knew and loved him as a
friend pen his obituary. I, who only knew
him through his matchless pen, bid farewell
to an artist who knew how to play upon
man's sense of fear as Kreisler plays upon
his violin. Those long, brooding, almost
somnolent opening paragraphs of his, almost
devoid of conversation — somehow, Love-
craft's pen seemed to falter when he attempt-
ed to put his words into a personal mouth —
impersonality was his keynote. With a sense
of nightmare, barely glimpsed, the reader's
eye fled from paragraph to paragraph, al-
most chased or driven, until the grotesque
climax was attained, the spell broken, the
pursuit lifted, leaving him weakened yet

strangely exhilarated. Fear, like fire, is
cleansing. Whitehead, Eadie, Howard,
Lovecraft, Each in his own field such an
undisputed master that the loss seems un-
bearable. Each, of course, has his disciples.
Robert Bloch, for instance, seems a fit pros-
elyte of Lovecraft, who, with experience, may
yet equal his master, but no disciple can fill
the place of his teacher in the mind and
heart of any who knew that teacher's genius.
I'm afraid this letter has spun itself out to
an immoderate length. I can only plead my
faithful service of years as an excuse and
draw it to a conclusion. ... As to your
authors, I have already spoken of Robert
Bloch. His tales are real gems and should
get even better as he gains experience. Good
old Seabury Quinn, almost the last of the
old brigade, wrote a real winner, The Globe
of Memories I believe it was called. Jack
Williamson usually shows perfect taste, but
his last was downright pitiable. I never
thought to read such a hodgepodge of vile
villainy and putty make-up, 'orrible plotting
and dastardly scheming in your magazine.
That stuff does not belong in the aristocratic
Weird Tales. Repeat not the offense. The
Last Pharaoh reads well, is exceedingly and
fluently written and promises a fine climax.
And who is this Clifford Ball? His Duar
the Accursed was a neat piece of craftsman-
ship, and should develop into a first-class
series."

A First-rate Job

Donald A. Wollheim, of New York City,
writes: "May I offer congratulations on
your August issue which is a first-rate job?
Lovecraft's yarn was one I had never read
before; Kuttner's was a superb little fable;
Frank Owen is a true master in his own
right; The Last Pharaoh is thoroughly in-
triguing and worth while. Wellman's
Necronomiconic is a honey. But it won't end
Necronomicon tales. I, for one, want to see
the Necro grow bigger and bigger. It was
one of the factors contributing to the mak-
ing of WT's vivid and unique personality."

The Terrible Parchment

Joseph Allen Ryan, of Cambridge, Mary-
land, writes: "Wellman's short, The Ter-
rible Parchment, was especially interesting to
me; for I believe I was on hand when the
idea for the tale was born. Otto Binder,
Julius Schwartz, Mort Weisinger and I (as
usual, I was die small frog in the big

WEIRD TALES

pond) were standing at the corner of West
48th Street and Broadway in New York Gty
last summer, chewing die rag a bit before
departing on our various ways. The con-
versation drifted to Weird Tales, and to
H. P. Lovccraft and the Necronomicon in
particular. Mort glanced at the near-by news
stand and remarked: 'Suppose you went
over to that stand and asked for a copy of
the Necronomicon, and the fellow handed
it to you. What would you do?' None of
us knew exactly what course he would fol-
low under the unusual circumstances. Otto
remarked: 'Pay for it, I guess.' Mort digest-
ed this for a moment or so, then continued:
'That would make a good plot for a story —
for some fan magazine, that is. You could
explain that Lovccraft's readers had thought
so much about the mythical Necronomicon
that their combined thought- force material-
ized it.' As Weisinger knows Manly Wade
Wcllman cruite well, it may be that the idea
got around to the latter, who developed it
into a short for WT. How about it, Manly?"

Cornish Scenery

I. O. Evans writes from Tadworth, in
Surrey: "As one of your many British read-
ers, I have greatly enjoyed the stories that
appear in your excellent magazine, and I
look forward to reading many more of them.
I was, however, surprized to find a rather
startling error in a story which appeared in
a recent issue — I forgec its name and that
of the author, but it dealt with the worship
of an Egyptian beast-god in a Cornish mine.
[The story was The Brood of Bubastis, by
Robert Bloch, in our March issue. — The
Ed.] In this the author speaks of the 'Cor-
nish countryside' as 'a region of mystic moun-
tains, and purple peaks that towered above
wild forest glens and grecn-grottoed swamp-
lands.' I don't think any description could
be less accurate! The highest hill in the
duchy is Brown Willy, of only 1,368 feet;
there are no forests — the bulk of the country
is moorland; and the only 'peaks' are those
of the hills of spoil from the numerous
mine-workings, which can hardly be said
to 'tower.' Later your author mentions local
faith in 'leprechauns,' which are Irish fairies,
and 'kelpies,' which are Scottish! The joke
is that the ' scenery of Cornwall has eery
qualities, and the people faith in spirits,
which would have suited your author's story
admirably had he got them right. What he

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WEIRD TALES

was really thinking of I don't know; prob-
ably Scotland. Now supposing an English
author, in a story, were to describe Rocky
Mountain scenery in Florida or Louisiana
bayous in Maine, would you be pleased?
Our islands may be small, but their differ-
ent regions have characters of their own."

Praise for The Carnal God

Max Armstrong, of Spokane, Washing-
ton, writes: "The Carnal God, written by
John R. Speer and Carlisle Schnirzcr, was
truly a magnificent story, well written, and
my choice for the best in the June issue.
Second is the one written by Paul Ernst,
Clicking Red Heels, a fascinating story, one
that holds your interest to the end. The
cover design by M. Brundage is a knock-
out!"

Random Notes by W. C, Jr.

"An acrostic sonnet, written in a seques-
tered Providence churchyard where Poe once
walked." Thus was Adolphe de Castro's
poem Edgar Allan Poe blurbed in the May
issue of Weird Tales. But what was not
announced was that seated beside de Castro
as he composed the acrostic verse were H. P.
Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow. . . . HPL, in-
cidentally, was a sixth cousin of Barlow.
. , . Jack Williamson, of Kansas, spent the
month of June with his old friend Edmond
Hamilton in Pennsylvania. . . . Robert Bloch
left his beloved Milwaukee for a few weeks'
stay with Henry Kuttncr in Beverly Hills.
C. L. Moore dropped in on them from In-
dianapolis, and Kuttner "had the pleasure
of taking C. L. Moore for a ride on the
roller coaster, and giving Jirel a new ex-
perience." . . . Kuttner's Hydra, soon to ap-
pear in WT, tells of die fate of Robert
Ludwig (Bloch), who is imprisoned and
mutilated in another dimension. In the
original version, H. P. Lovecraft was anodi-
er main character in the tale, hiding under
the name Howard Phillips; but after his de-
mise a revision obviously was necessary.
Kuttner himself is in the story, presenting
credentials under his brother's name. . . .
Virgil Finlay, who has had an appreciable
amount of work exhibited at the famed art
center in Rochester, may illustrate the Der-
leth-Wandrei volume of Lovecraft's works.
. . . I wish to retract a statement made last
time to the effect that Earl Peirce, Jr.'s The
Surgery Master had been rejected by Editor

Wright and handed over to Bruce Bryan for
a collaborative revision. The tale was not
even submitted to WT until it had been re-
worked by the two young writers of Wash-
ington. It will appear under the title, The
While Rat. ... A convertible coupe over-
turned on Peirce recently in the Adiron-
dacks, and he came out of it with his due of
lacerations and bruises. If the windshield on
the car had struck Peirce four inches lower
he would have been beheaded. . . . The
Scarab, proposed official organ of the Wash-
ington Weird Tales Club, will not see
publication after all. . . . Clifford Ball's
next Raid story is The Goddess Awakes, a
1 4,000- worder. WT has also accepted Ball's
The Swine of Aeaea, 13,000 words, built
around die legend of Circe the Enchantress.
This 29-year-old newest sensation of Weird
Tales has led a life as adventurous as thar
of either of his two barbarian heroes. He
went through high school in Miller stown,
Pennsylvania, experiencing great difficulty
with his mathematics and with a young and
attractive school-teacher of whom he be-
came enamored. After he had been grad-
uated, he took a job in the license bureau
of the State Highway Department. A few
months later he began to hate the place, and
left. The Miami catastrophe of 1927 oc-
curred, and he and a friend trekked south
to Florida, expecting to find heavy salaries
waiting for eager workers. The state was
"broke;" and tourists, alarmed by the tidal
wave, were frightened away. Ball has slung
hash, worked on dynamite crews as a cap-
per, fry-cooked, run a dice table in a
gambling-house, dug ditches, leveled auto
springs, spread cloth in a shirt factory, and
served beer in a Virginia tavern. This will
always remain in Ball's memory, he says, as
the best moments of his life.

Weird Tales of the Sea

Arthur L. Widner, Jr., writes from Water-
bury, Vermont: "The July issue is one of
the best to date. The cover is the most
realistic-looking painting I have ever seen.
Clifford Ball seems to have stepped into
Robert E. Howard's shoes, but whether he
will fill them is another question. So far he
has not done too bad, but his feet will have
to grow some before he can equal The Devil
in Iron, Black Cattaan, and other creepy
tales. When I heard of Lovecraft's death
it seemed as if I had been hit with some

WEIRD TALES

511

sort of strange paralysis. I just couldn't
realize that I would read no more of his
faultless masterpieces or receive another let-
ter in his small, unusual hand. Yes, he even
found time to write to an ordinary person
like myself. No one can ever take his place.
Stories as good as his may be written, but no
one author can ecjual his string of A-l weird
tales. The Ocean Ogre was easily the best
tale in the issue. I always liked sea horrors
especially anyway. Graveyards, vampires
and werewolves are fairly familiar, in fact
they seem like old friends to me; but the
sea, with its slimy slithery beings from the
deep dark depths, always frightens me. In„
man's own element, land, most any fear can
be borne, but the alien atmosphere of the
water has two strikes on you to start with.
The Hounds of Tindalos runs a close sec-
ond, and is the best story I've yet read by
Long. The angles and curves business was
something new to me and heightened the
interest quite a bit. The Whistling Corpse
cops the yellow ribbon. It is reminiscent of
Marion Crawford's Upper Berth. The liv-
ing fog put in an eery touch."

A Satisfied English Reader

C. R. Forster, of Bardon Mill, Northum-
berland, writes: "It is almost exactly a year
since I discovered my first Weird Tales, in
an English book shop. I am a science-
fiction fan, and it was with some doubt, and
with unpleasant memories of various hor-
ror and terror magazines, that I started into
it. But I liked that issue and subsequent
ones so well that I started to get the maga-
zine regularly from your English agent. WT
is now my favorite magazine and I wouldn't
miss an issue for anything. I was lucky
enough to get hold of a few scattered back
numbers for the years 1928-30. Although
they contained many excellent stories, I be-
lieve thac the magazine of today is an im-
provement over them, both in contents and
appearance. This in itself was a pleasant
surprize, for my experience with science-
fiction magazines has been pretty much the
opposite. My favorite authors are (or were)
H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L.
Moore, Robert E. Howard and Seabury
Quinn. These five stood on a pinnacle above
the rest, and the loss of Lovecraft and
Howard is indeed a blow to fantasy-lovers.
I hope you will reprint many of their best
stories. Of Lovecraft, in particular, I could

NEXT MONTH

LIVING
BUDDHESS

By Seabury Quinn

A strange and fascinating tale of a
living female Buddha and the
dreadful transformation of a lovely
American girl in the ghoul-haunted
city of Harrisonville, N. J. A curious
tale of a dire Buddhist lama from out
of devil-ridden Asia.

Strange indeed have been many of
the adventures of Jules de Gran-
din, occultist-extraordinary and ghost-
breaker-supreme, but never before has
he encountered a situation more strange
or more curious than in this enthral-
ling story. The tale of the little French
scientist's latest exploit will be printed
complete

in the November issue of

WEIRD TALES

on sale October 1st

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Enclosed find SI. 00, for which send me the next
five Issues o£ WEIRD TALES, to begin with the
November issue. (Special ofTer void unless remit-
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WEIRD TALES

never tire. . . . Your covers in recent issues
have been especially good. Virgil Finlay is
even belter on the cover than on inside work,
and the competition seems to have aroused
Mrs. Brundage to surpass her previous ef-
forts, good though they were. From the
above you will gather that you have at least
one well-satisfied reader. May Weird Tales
and yourself always prosper."

A Few Remarks

C. L. Leigh ton, of Chicago, writes: "Al-
though I've read through every issue for the
last 8 or 9 years, this is my first letter,
though I sent a coupon, with remarks of en-
thusiastic admiration, when you printed The
Solitary Hunters. (I still consider this your
very finest over all the years.) The Eyrie is
always interesting; probably like other
Weird readers, I find myself looking each
month for Miss Hemken's contribution. The
varying and conflicting tastes of your read-
ers (including my own) are amusing; Mr.
Hoyer will likely laugh at my considering
Return to Earth best for June, but I liked
the careless, casual style in which Usru criti-
cized our backward planet, still doping our
idiotic wars. Like him I found The Last
Pharaoh getting better, but Mr. Kelley copies
from Doyle's Brigadier Gerard. . . . In every
issue I find at least one story worth clipping
out and saving; so I have accumulated quite
a stock over the years. Among the best are
Northwest's trip to Jupiter, and his encoun-
ter with the beauty filled with evil smoke;
yet I can't get a kick out of Jircl of Joiry —
how Mr. Moore will hook up 22nd Century
Smith and Middle Ages Jirel, is something I
rather look forward to. Of course I've pre-
served every Conan story — everything by the
great master Howard. Noting Mr. Sivia's
letter, I wonder if Duar the Accursed might
sometime succeed Conan in our hearts? (He
ought to drop that Irish accent, though.)
You will note I like to cover the past in my
preferences — I find so much repetition re-
garding the last issue rather tiring. Mrs.
Shover makes just criticism of hackneyed
'horror' words — one reason I admired The
Solitary Hr/nters, written in careless up-to-
date slang."

Concise Comments

Richard H. Jamison, of Valley Park, Mis-
souri, writes: "With the two huge gaps so
recently made iu die ranks of Weird's

authors, it would be fine if a few of the old
favorites could be coaxed into writing some
more tales. How about writing some more
like The Space-Eaters. Mr. Long? And
what of the two Wandreis, H. Warner
Munn, Mary E. Counsel man, etc. ? Aren't
they writing weird tales any more?"

Ian C. Knox, of London, England, writes:
"Congratulations on getting a substitute for
Howard. I refer, of course, to Clifford Ball.
I only hope he docs not either get stereo-
typed or run short of ideas and dry up. His
first two stories were excellent."

Robert Oberon, of Denmark, Maine,
writes: "I had to write a line and tell you
how well I liked The Mandarin's Ear. that
swell story by Frank Owen in the August
issue. Let us hear from Owen more often."

D. Rouse, of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania,
writes: "I like the story, Duar the Accursed
by Clifford Ball, and would like some more
stories by the same author. It is certainly
weird, but good reading."

Charles Waldman, of Far Rockaway, New
York, writes: "I have been reading your un-
usual magazine for several years now. Need-
less to say it has pleased me greatly. The
magazine is truly unusual and out of the or-
dinary."

Bruce Bryan, of Washington, D. C,
writes: "The Statement of Randolph Carter,
in the current WT, is swell. I must've missed
it when it first appeared. Second, I like The
Mandarin's Ear. And The Abyss Under the
World starts out well."

Fred John Walscn, of Denver, writes:
"Congratulations upon your success in keep-
ing the same high level for the Weird
Tales stories, while the other publications
sink lower and lower. It is a real treat to be
able to read some of the true Poe type of
fiction, and I trust that you will continue to
publish in the same high standard."

Most Popular Story

Readers, what is your favorite story in this
issue? Write a letter to the Eyrie, Weird
Tales, and let us know your preferences.
The most popular story in our August is-
sue, as shown by your votes and letters, was
the concluding installment of The Last
Pharaoh, by Thomas P. Kelley. This was
closely pressed for first honors by Frank
Owen's charming Chinese fantasy, The
Mandarin's Ear.

W. T. — 8

The Phantom of the Ether

The first warning of the stupendous cataclysm that be-
fell the earth in the fourth decade of the Twentieth
Century was recorded simultaneously in several parts
of America. At twelve minutes past 3 o'clock a. m..
during a lull in the night's aerial business-, several of
the larger stations of the Western hemisphere began
picking up strange signals out of the ether. They were
faint and ghostly, as if coming from a vast distance.
As far as anyone could learn, the signals originated no-
where upon the earth. // was ns if some phantom irere
whispering through the ether in the language of
another planet.

A Mysterious Message from the Ether!

"To All Mankind

"I am the dictator of human destiny. Through control of the earth's internal
forces I am master of every existing thing. I can blot out all life — destroy the
globe itself. It is my intention to abolish all present governments and make my-
self emperor of the earth.

"Communicate this to the various governments of the earth:

"As a preliminary to the establishment of my sole rule throughout the world,
tlie following demands must be complied with:

"First: All standing armies shall be disbanded, and every implement of war-
fare, of whatsoever nature, destroyed.

"Second: All war vessels shall be assembled — those of the Atlantic fleets mid-
way between New York and Gibraltar, those of the Pacific fleets midway between
San Francisco and Honolulu—and sunk.

"Third: One-half of all the monetary gold supply of the world shall be col-
lected and turned over to my agents at places to be announced later.

"fourth: At noon on the third day after the foregoing demands have been
complied v/ith. all existing governments shall resign and surrender their powers
to my agents, who will be or. hand to receive them.

"In my next communication I will fix the date for the fulfillment of these
demands.

"The alternative is the destruction of the globe.

"KWO"

Thrills! Mystery! Excitement!— "THE MOON TERROR

Who was this mysterious "KWO," and was his
message actually a momentous declaration to the
human race, or merely a hoax perpetrated by some
person with an over-vivid imagination?

Newspapers and scientific journals began to spec-
ulate upon the matter, advancing all manner of
theories to account for this strange summons. In

Europe, as well as in America, vast throngs of
excited people filled the streets in front of the
newspaper offices, watching the bulletin boards for
further developments. Was this really the begin-
ning of the dissolution of our planet?

While the supply lasts, you can get a copy of
this startling book at the special close-out price of
only 50c. Send your order today to:

POPULAR FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY,
840 N. Michigan Ave. Chicago, 111., U. S. A.

Special Bargain Offer

YOURS

While They Last
At Reduced Price
Only Fifty Cents

1

Beautifully
bound in rich Hue
cloth with attractive orange-
colored cover jacket.

THE MOON TERROR, by A. G. DIMENSION, by Farnsworth Wright, is

Birch, is a stupendous weird-scientific an uproarious skit on the four-dimensional

novel of Oriental intrigue to gain control theories of the mathematicians, and inter-

of the world. planetary stories in general.

ALSO— OTHER STORIES LIMITED SUPPLY

In addition to the full-length novel, this Make sure of getting your copy now before the

book also contains three shorter stories by close-out supply is exhausted. Send your order

well-known authors of thrilling weird- today for this book at the price
scientific fiction-

Note: This book for sale from the publishers

OOZE, by Anthony M. Rud, tells of a only. It cannot be purchased in any book store.

biologist who removed the growth limita- r— — —

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PENELOPE, by Vincent Starrett, is a I M0ON terror as per your special otter,

'fascinating tale of the star Penelope, and I Name

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